Innovation Profs - 6/20/2025

Welcome to Gen AI Summer School

We’re spending the summer teaching you the essentials you need to succeed in an AI-forward world.

Here’s the plan:

• May 30: Intro to large language models

• June 6: Multimedia tools

• June 13: Guide to prompting

• Today: Building a prompt library

• June 27: Building Custom GPTs

• July 11: Intro to reasoning models

• July 18: Intro to deep research

• July 26: AI ethics

• Aug. 1: Implementing Gen AI in your job

• Aug. 8: Implementing Gen AI at your company

• Aug. 15: The road to Artificial General Intelligence

• Aug. 22: Where Gen AI is headed

From prompting to building a prompt library

Last week we laid out our BRIEF guide to prompting. Recall the main ingredients that make up a good prompt: Background, Role, Instructions, Examples, and Format. You may have gathered from our discussion that developing an effective prompt is no simple matter, often taking quite a bit of testing, revising, and fine-tuning. What do we do with such well-developed prompts once we have produced them?

One solution is to combine our prompts, as well as other prompts we may find to be useful, in a prompt library. What exactly is a prompt library? Here’s a helpful definition: “A prompt library is a curated collection of prompts, which are carefully crafted questions, statements, or instructions designed to elicit specific responses or outcomes from large language models (LLMs).”

Why build a prompt library?

The same source linked above provides four reasons for using a prompt library:

• Prompt libraries ensure consistency and quality in our prompts.

• Prompt libraries are efficient, saving us from having to produce our prompts from scratch.

• Prompt libraries can spark creativity and experimentation with LLMs.

• Prompt libraries are useful for collaborating and sharing prompts within a team or organization.

Examples of prompt libraries

Here are some examples of prompt libraries for you to peruse:

How to build your own prompt library

Now that you’ve seen a few examples of prompt libraries, let’s consider how to build a prompt library of our own.

Just as BRIEF is a useful heuristic for prompting, here we can use SCORE to help us build and maintain our own prompt libraries:

S — Set your goals: Define the purpose of your prompt library.

C — Collect and curate prompts: Gather useful prompts from various sources, include ones you’ve developed that are particularly useful, or even ask an LLM to craft prompts for you.

O — Organize your prompts: Divide your prompts into different general categories depending on different tasks that fall under the broader purpose of your prompt library.

R — Refine your prompts: Test out your prompts to see if they achieve the desired results. If not, modify them until you achieve the desired level of performance.

E — Export your prompt library: Share your prompt library with other individuals in your organization, for instance, in a shared Word document or a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

A well-crafted prompt is a powerful tool, but we can increase its impact when we store, share, and reuse it within a thoughtfully organized prompt library. By applying the SCORE framework, you can build a resource that not only saves time and ensures consistency but also encourages collaboration. Whether you're working alone or as part of a team, a prompt library turns prompting from a one-off task into a scalable, strategic asset.