We’re spending the summer teaching you the essentials you need to succeed in an AI-forward world.

Here’s the plan:

Last week we laid out our BRIEF guide to prompting. Recall the main ingredients that make up a good prompt: Background, Role, Instructions, Examples, and Format. You may have gathered from our discussion that developing an effective prompt is no simple matter, often taking quite a bit of testing, revising, and fine-tuning. What do we do with such well-developed prompts once we have produced them?

One solution is to combine our prompts, as well as other prompts we may find to be useful, in a prompt library. What exactly is a prompt library? Here’s a helpful definition: “A prompt library is a curated collection of prompts, which are carefully crafted questions, statements, or instructions designed to elicit specific responses or outcomes from large language models (LLMs).”

The same source linked above provides four reasons for using a prompt library:

Here are some examples of prompt libraries for you to peruse:

Now that you’ve seen a few examples of prompt libraries, let’s consider how to build a prompt library of our own.

Just as BRIEF is a useful heuristic for prompting, here we can use SCORE to help us build and maintain our own prompt libraries:

S — Set your goals: Define the purpose of your prompt library.

C — Collect and curate prompts: Gather useful prompts from various sources, include ones you’ve developed that are particularly useful, or even ask an LLM to craft prompts for you.

O — Organize your prompts: Divide your prompts into different general categories depending on different tasks that fall under the broader purpose of your prompt library.

R — Refine your prompts: Test out your prompts to see if they achieve the desired results. If not, modify them until you achieve the desired level of performance.

E — Export your prompt library: Share your prompt library with other individuals in your organization, for instance, in a shared Word document or a spreadsheet.

A well-crafted prompt is a powerful tool, but we can increase its impact when we store, share, and reuse it within a thoughtfully organized prompt library. By applying the SCORE framework, you can build a resource that not only saves time and ensures consistency but also encourages collaboration. Whether you're working alone or as part of a team, a prompt library turns prompting from a one-off task into a scalable, strategic asset.