I Lost My Voice
How burying prompts in app code left me speechless—and why platform teams need prompt management.
I lost my voice.
Not literally, but in my application. The prompts that defined my system’s “voice” were buried inside main.py. When something broke—or when I just wanted to tweak tone and guardrails—I had no clean way to work my way back. I had to dig through code, patch things in place, and hope I didn’t break something else.
That’s when it hit me: prompts are platform, not app.
Why This Matters
When your prompts live inside application code, you lose:
Consistency – Every team reinvents wording.
Governance – No clear versioning or ownership.
Flexibility – Tweaks require code changes instead of config updates.
The result? Drift. Bugs. And in my case, silence.
What a Prompt Management System Should Be
Think of prompts the same way you think about configs or runbooks. A proper system includes:
Externalized artifacts – Store prompts in YAML/JSON, not hard-coded strings. They’re part of your platform inventory.
Schema and metadata – Every prompt package should carry context: purpose, inputs/outputs, system message, template, variables, safety notes, model targets.
Versioning – Treat prompts like code releases. Tag them (
v1.2.0), track history, and know when you’re deprecating an old version.Ownership and governance – Each prompt has a named owner. If a business unit needs to deviate, someone is accountable for maintaining and paying down that divergence.
Cross-team reuse – Shared prompts for “summarize support ticket” or “generate meeting notes” should live in one place, not scattered across apps.
Evaluation baked in – Pair each prompt with a small golden set of test cases. Run them on every change to spot regressions before they hit production.
Discoverability – A lightweight catalog or gallery so teams can find and use what already exists.
This isn’t developer convenience. It’s the difference between “we have a neat AI feature” and “we can operate AI at scale.”
The Platform Angle
Ironically, GCP (my current platform of choice) already ships this as part of Vertex AI Prompt Management—versioning, sharing, even an optimizer. That’s a good reminder: prompt management is a platform engineering system, not a developer afterthought.