Hack and Track

The Necessity for Saving and Organizing Prompts

Experimenting, testing, and refining your prompts are essential to mastering prompt engineering. Crafting the perfect prompt often involves trying various strategies to discover what works best for your specific needs. A best practice is to constantly experiment, practice, and try new things using an approach called “hack and track.” This involves using a note taking app, a wiki or a spreadsheet or other method to track what prompts work well as you experiment.

Prompts often disappear in chat logs, making it crucial to save and organize them systematically. Keeping track of prompts is essential because it’s rare to get the desired response on your first attempt. An iterative process of testing different prompts, analyzing responses, and tweaking your approach allows you to hone your technique gradually. Additionally, as language models (LLMs) constantly evolve, their performance can vary over time and across different domains and tasks. Tracking effective prompts helps maintain and improve prompt quality as models change.

Tools for tracking Prompts

These differently positioned tools provide a variety of features to help you organize, track, and share prompts effectively.

Tool	Strengths
Confluence	Ideal for team collaboration, integrates with other Atlassian tools, supports detailed documentation.
GitBook	Perfect for creating and maintaining documentation, integrates with GitHub and GitLab, supports version control.
GitLab	Comprehensive DevOps platform, excellent for managing project documentation, integrates with CI/CD pipelines.
Google Keep	Simple and quick note-taking, captures short prompts and ideas, syncs across Google accounts and devices.
Microsoft OneNote	Extensive note-taking with rich text formatting and multimedia support.
Notion	Versatile and highly customizable, supports databases, calendars, and team collaboration.
Obsidian	Markdown-based, excellent for linked notes and knowledge management.
Trello	Visual project management, organizes prompts in cards and lists, tracks tasks effectively.

The Stars

Obsidian and Gitbook are my stars. Obsidian for storing and organizing prompts, ideation und note-taking, Gitbook for documentation and publishing a subset of prompts in projects or lecturing scripts online.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking app that stores files locally on your device instead of in the cloud. With Obsidian, you use markdown language to create your notes. Unlike Notion, which has a database structure, Obsidian has a knowledge graph structure where all your notes are interconnected through bi-directional linking.

Important Features for managing Prompts

• Markdown format for easy copy/pasting amongst different apps

• Desktop an mobile Apps

• Code block format

• Easy Drag an Drop organisation

• Unlimited Vaults

• Local and cloud installation (hey, why don't you put it on your cloud driver)

• Knowledge graph

• Free plan available

Obsidian

Gitbook

GitBook is a documentation platform that allows users to create, edit, and share knowledge bases and technical documentation using a simple and intuitive interface. It is ideal for creating technical documentation such as developer guides, API documentation, and user manuals.

Important Features for managing Prompts

• Public Sharing as Website possible

• Markdown format for easy copy/pasting amongst different apps

• Desktop an mobile Apps

• Code block format

• Unlimited Documentation spaces

• Knowledge graph

• Several Integrations like Figma, Loom, Youtube, Google Slides, Github

• Free plan available

gitbook