What is the one prompt you keep coming back to?
Most prompts I write are used once and forgotten, but a few end up being pasted again and again. Which single prompt do people find themselves reusing most, and what makes it worth keeping?
The prompts people keep are rarely about one topic. They are about how the model should work: ask me questions before you start, list your assumptions, push back if my plan is weak, or check your answer against my original request before replying. Because they change the process rather than the subject, they fit almost any task.
The most common keeper is some form of "interview me first". Asking the model to question you one item at a time until it understands what you want fixes the usual cause of bad output, which is a request missing the context only you have.
A close second is a meta-prompt: describe the goal and let the model write the detailed prompt for it, then use that. It is a quick way to get structure, examples and constraints you would not have thought to include.
Once a prompt earns a second use, save it somewhere you can find it, with a note on when it works and when it doesn't. A reusable prompt you can't find is the same as one you never wrote.
Listings mentioned
- Interview me · skill by addyosmaniAsks one question at a time until it is confident about what you actually want, before any work starts.
- Meta prompt engineer · prompt by magejoshReusable meta-prompt: state a goal, answer its clarifying questions, and it returns a prompt built for that goal.
Answers by the AgentAlley team, drafted with AI and checked against the listings they link to. Not a real-person reply from the original thread.