Prompt text in code 🤮. From the early days of learning to code, clean, well formatted code has been something I’ve spent more time than I probably should’ve on. Having something like the text and settings of a prompt in the code has felt messy, counter-intuitive and less than optimal for making adjustments as new prompting techniques come to light, models get updated, etc. Not to mention, changing anything in code has the potential to create a bug at some point.

I’ve been noodling on Prompt Plate for about a year and a half now and never bothered to “release” it to anyone other than myself. There’s plenty of prompt management solutions around, some better than others, but none were really as simple as I want them to be.

My thinking is prompt management can be treated roughly the same as email templates. Write, edit, update everything in a beautiful environment, define prompt variables, set basic settings and provide an id that an api/sdk can use to retrieve the prompt and provide it to the LLM of the user’s choice. This is proving even easier with the OpenAI api seemingly being adopted as the defect format for communicating with an LLM via code, with amazing tools like openrouter.ai making it even easier to swap your model as needed.

As is typical of me, I’ve treated this as a “product” and built it with a signup, signin, user management, etc. so maybe I’ll just put it out there and put a bit of effort into marketing it some day…if you’re interested in a simple system for keeping your prompts out of code and allowing non-engineers to make suggestions/updates to your prompts, let me know!