Prompt sprawl is real
I have fourteen versions of the same prompt. Here's how I started deduping them.
Somewhere around month three of using AI tools seriously, I realised I had fourteen variations of roughly the same incident summary prompt scattered across Notion, VS Code snippets, a Teams message I’d sent myself, and a text file called prompts-final-FINAL.txt.
This is prompt sprawl, and it’s embarrassing, and apparently I’m not alone.
How it happens
You write a prompt. It works okay. You tweak it for a specific situation. You forget where the original is. You write a new one. Repeat.
The tweaks are the problem. Each tweak feels small — changing “bullet points” to “numbered list,” adjusting the tone, adding a constraint. But each tweak branches the prompt, and you never merge them back.
What I did about it
Three things, none of them technical:
Picked one place. I moved everything to a single Notion page. Not because Notion is the right tool but because it’s where I already am.
Named prompts by task, not by quality. “incident-summary-v4-good” tells me nothing. “incident-summary-for-executive-audience” is actually findable.
Kept a graveyard. Instead of deleting old prompts, I moved them to an archive section. Twice I’ve gone back to find that the “worse” old version was actually better for a specific case.
That’s it. No prompt management software, no elaborate taxonomy. Just one place and slightly better naming.