A prompt library a two-person business can keep

The prompt that worked is in somebody’s chat history

This is how the knowledge leaks out of a small business. Someone works out a request that produces excellent quote introductions. It lives in their history. Three weeks later they cannot find it, and rewrite something nearly as good but not quite. Then they leave.

A prompt you use weekly is a piece of business equipment. Store it where equipment is stored.

The file

One document. A Google Doc, a Word file, a plain text file in your shared drive, a note in your project management tool. Free, and the format matters much less than its existing somewhere shared.

One entry per prompt, five fields:

NAME: Enquiry reply - pricing questions
UPDATED: 2026-08-14
USE FOR: WhatsApp and Instagram price enquiries.
         Not for complaints, not for wholesale.
PROMPT:
  [the full text, including constraints]
KNOWN FAILURES:
  - Adds a delivery estimate if the area is not on the facts sheet. Always check for a bare number.
  - Over-friendly with one-line messages; cut the opener.

The last field is the one people leave out and the one that earns its place. It is the accumulated experience of the person who used the prompt three hundred times, written down in two lines, and it makes the difference between handing over a prompt and handing over competence.

Naming, so the file stays usable

At six entries, anything works. At thirty, an unstructured list is a place prompts go to be forgotten.

Name by task, then by variant: Enquiry reply - pricing, Enquiry reply - availability, Enquiry reply - complaint. Alphabetical order then groups them for free, without a folder structure to maintain.

And delete aggressively. A prompt nobody has used in three months is noise, and the file’s value collapses when scanning it takes longer than rewriting the prompt.

Dates and versions

Put the date on every entry and change it when you edit.

When a vendor updates a model, some prompts start behaving differently, usually subtly. A date tells you whether an entry predates the change, which turns a mystery into a short list to re-test. The regression file in module eight is built on exactly this.

You do not need version control. You do need to know that this prompt has not been looked at since March.

Where the prompts should actually live

The file is the master copy. For daily use, put the prompt where it will be used:

• Standing instructions for the one or two prompts used constantly. No copying at all.
• Saved prompts, projects or custom assistants, if your tool has them. Convenient, and they are inside a vendor’s product, so keep the master copy in your own file, because you will change tools eventually.
• Text expansion. A snippet tool such as Espanso, which is free and open source, or the text replacement built into iOS, Android and macOS. Type ;reply and the full prompt appears. Underrated, costs nothing, and works across every tool.

Sharing without a meeting

When someone finds a prompt that works, they add it to the file and say one sentence at the end of the day. That is the entire process.

What kills this in small businesses is formality. If adding a prompt requires a template, a review or a discussion, nobody adds anything and the file dies within a month. A slightly messy file that people actually update is worth ten times a tidy one that stopped in February.

Once a quarter, spend twenty minutes: delete the dead ones, re-test the ones you rely on, fix the entries whose known-failures list has grown. That is the whole maintenance burden.

What a first library actually contains

For a typical shop or small service business, the first six entries are dull and cover most of the volume:

1. Reply to a price enquiry.
2. Reply to an availability or booking question.
3. Reply to a complaint, drafting only, promising nothing.
4. Turn rough notes into a quote or proposal section.
5. Chase an overdue invoice, three levels of firmness.
6. Turn a voice note about the day into a post.

Nothing exotic. If your library is full of clever prompts you tried once and none of these six, it is a collection of experiments rather than equipment.

What does not belong in it

One-off requests. Anything you will not use again within a month. Anything so specific to a single customer that adapting it takes longer than starting fresh.

The failure mode of a prompt library is not that it is too small; it is that it grows into an archive nobody reads. Six entries you actually use beats sixty you scroll past, and the quarterly delete is what keeps the ratio right.