Hi I’m Tris, and I’m a prompt hoarder
Endless inspiration, but you have to give back too
I love finding and collecting prompts. Organizing them is something else entirely—I’m using Javelin now, tried NotebookLM, might try Obsidian next—often am looking for a prompt thinking “I know I have a prompt for this…”, and that’s how this story started out.
I’m sure I have a persona prompt!
I’ve been doing research for one of my clients on their target market for a new campaign. Half of the research was confirming my gut feelings, the other half was rounding out my knowledge on the topic. Of course, me being me, I found the research fascinating. A lot of “wow, that’s cool” along with “huh, I had it right,” but most of all thinking that our assumptions about the market segment were too broad. We needed to parse out some new personas based on the data.
So I went to my prompt stash and searched for “persona” and…nothing.
Huh.
Okay, I guess was time to start developing one. Just as I was about to start the usual “help me write a prompt to…, ask me one question at a time…” thing I realized I do that a lot. So as lots of folks point out, if you do this more than a few times, you should make a repeatable custom GPT for it.
Creating JARVIS
Yeah, yeah I know, the name. I’m a geek, just ask my digital twin Tricutus of Borg. Let’s move on shall we?
My idea was to use the Trust Insights CASINO framework to both create the prompt and be the basis for the prompt when it’s done. The goal was a prompt I could use whenever I need to create a prompt so I always follow a set methodology.
And it worked.
Sorta.
First try, good but…
JARVIS v1 did give me a prompt to create personas. The output was good. Had to deal with some gender bias, but that’s the tool, not the prompt. But the prompt. Something was just…off.
I thought the prompt was too simple. My best prompts are pretty long and detailed. There didn’t seem like the generated prompt was up to snuff. Okay, let’s refine and refactor.
Avengers refactor!
For JARVIS v2 I took out things that included the CASINO headings. And tried to get the output better. Ironically, JARVIS as a prompt was long and pretty detailed, it was the prompt it spit out that I didn’t like.
Ran the v2 through creating a prompt and it was better. The ironic thing was coming up with prompt ideas to test is like the thing when you need to talk about something and can’t think of anything to say.
Anyway…
Share and share alike
This is the point where I wanted to give back to the community. The Trust Insights Slack group is an amazing community with a wealth of knowledge. The amount of stuff shared—especially from Christopher and Katie—is amazing. It’s like a running master class in AI.
Because I leveraged the CASINO prompt to both create JARVIS and in JARVIS itself, I felt the right thing to do was share what I made with the community. I almost shared v1, but that little thing niggling in the back of my head that led to v2 kept me from doing it.
I pasted v2 into my thread and immediately thought there was something I was missing. Something was wrong and it wouldn’t let me let it go. Not to mention I wasn’t going to share a crap prompt with this community of experts.
Inspiration strikes
It hit me that maybe it was my framework assumption that was the problem. Back to refactoring I queried if CASINO wasn’t the right framework.
Nope, Gemini said that was okay. Hmm. Not convinced. The part of the response hit me. It mentioned other frameworks. RACE! I needed to weave RACE into JARVIS! Gemini was skeptical, but I insisted. The refactored result was better. The prompt output was more detailed, had better context sections, seemed like it was a good step up. Perfect?
Nope, but good enough to post v3 in the Slack thread. In the interest of “creating in public” I kept v2 there. It’s not that v2 is a bad prompt, it’s just not a great prompt.
Why this matters
From the earliest days of the web (remember folks, the internet existed long before HTTP was invented) we learned from each other by viewing source and copying the cool parts we needed. Sure we read the books—there weren’t many at first—and looked at W3 and all the other places, but we really learned by looking at other people’s work and unabashedly copying what they did. What’s the saying, “good writers copy, great writers steal”? That was web design for probably a decade.
Because I’m an OG web dev (and blogger), I still hold to that. Learn by copying. Refine what you find. Share back to the community. It’s how programming works today (probably always) and I think as we all navigate the world of AI we need to make sure we give back to the community.
I built JARVIS on CASINO and RACE, so I’m giving back to the community so others can use it. It’s also why I posted v2 and v3 of JARVIS, so people can see for themselves how it evolved. This doesn’t mean I’m going to share all my IP. No, that’s not going to happen, but I do offer a paid workshop where you do get a few of my prompts and more than a few tips along the way. The link to sign up for my workshop coming up September 10th is at the end of this post.
So let’s remember as we find and copy all those great prompts, make sure you share a few too.
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Join me for next hands-on workshop
Coming up on September 10th I’m holding my next hands-on workshop on using AI—constructively—for content marketing.
Get hands-on with AI and walk away with a Brand Voice Guide, Comprehensive Content Audit, a Custom Content Calendar, all the prompts we used, and plus an ebook with my favorite prompts for marketers.
?In my AI-Powered Content Workshop, you’ll get:
- A preliminary content audit of your website (done for you, before the workshop)
- Expert-crafted AI prompts to create a comprehensive content audit and brand voice guide to fast-track your strategy.
- Live, guided session to build your core content assets and learn how to write prompts like a pro.
?”Few content marketers engage with AI as thoughtfully as Tris. In this workshop, he shares impactful prompts that he spent months refining and gives you the space to learn by applying them. You’ll leave with shortcuts you can use to produce meaningful drafts of content strategy documents.” —Riviera Lev-Aviv, Principal at RL Content Strategy & Service
“This workshop answered so many questions for me as a content marketer looking to keep up with current trends and create efficiencies. Tris is an amazing facilitator; he interacted with each of us during this hands-on workshop to ensure we were getting value from the information and understood clearly how we can leverage AI platforms as partners in our work.. We also received materials to get us started. I will be recommending this workshop to my network.” — Alix Crawley