Hello !

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Do you know what a library in the 21st century will look like?

This is a library with your best instructions for AI, a prompt library. Building a prompt library can save you time and make your use of AI more systematic. Unfortunately, many clients and peers neglect the importance of updating and organizing their prompts.

So today, in this newsletter, you will learn why and how to create an effective prompt library and tips for keeping it up to date.

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Get comfortable for your 5 minutes of sparks to hack.

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✨ Spark

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✏ A new skill to grow

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To work alongside AI successfully, there’s a shift happening in the skills we need.

Soft skills or emotional intelligence are about relationships with humans (and nothing soft about it, this is quite hard 😅, for example with my teenagers).

Hard Skills or technical skills: It is about our expertise to performing the tasks.

Out skills or AI literacy. It goes beyond the boundaries of soft and hard skills. Humans are developing AI teams performing tasks for them. It's the ability to deploy our knowledge and mental frameworks across a digital team shaped by us.

Today, we no longer hire or sell only our own hard and soft skills, but also bring along those AI assistants we built over the years. (I read about the concept of "out skills" in Marie Dolle's amazing newsletter.)

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So, if this becomes more important than your resume and training certification, how can you best structure this skill?

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✏ Your personal library of prompts

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Each time you have an ask to AI, you write a prompt.

If you had to hire people for a job, would you each time start from a blank page and rewrite all the job descriptions? Probably not. This is a waste of time, right?

The same goes for your prompts. You should not rewrite them each time! You waste time and don't get the benefit of improving it. So create a space to store them. This is your prompt library.

It is a structured collection of your AI prompts to let you quickly pull the exact prompt you need.

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✏ Prompt of instruction vs template

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In fact, you will have at least 2 types of prompts: prompt and template (no, this is not confusing 😅).

Prompt: the instruction to perform the task. Prompts are generally brief and allow for flexibility. They don’t outline a specific structure for responses. Example: "Describe the impact of AI on the future of work."

Template: provides a structured framework or layout to guide responses. It specifies exactly where each part of the response should go, creating a consistent format for multiple outputs. They are more detailed and structured, often containing placeholders or sections that need to be filled in with specific information.

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✨ Hack

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So, how do you start easily?

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✏ Update your prompts regularly

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Make a habit to refine and update your prompts. Each time you iterate the output of a prompt ( like "add a column," "put that in CHF, not in Euro," "do it in French and English,"..), ask the LLM (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) to rewrite the prompt to get directly to this outcome.

So it will capture all the iterations you made.

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Imagine you do that consistently for the next 10 years? You will achieve massive improvement, and your library will become a key asset for finding clients and getting the dream job.

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✏ Keep your prompt library outside your work’s IT environment

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This library is an extension of your unique skills and expertise. Remember the out skill? So you own it. It is an asset like your network.

So protect it.

Store your library in a tool you can easily access outside your IT work environment. You never know.

It could start with a Word document. Mine is in Notion.

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✏ Give and lose capabilities.

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As much as I am a big advocate of building out skills and libraries, I do that intentionally.

You will likely lose the capabilities and skills for the tasks you delegate to an LMM. At best, you will not develop it.

For example, I always ask an LLM to correct typos (I was already bad at spelling school 😱). Now I get really lazy and never get the first script of my writing clean. I know someone else will do it.

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So, next time you delegate a task and store a prompt in your library, ask yourself how to use the time you free up to build new skills or enjoy time with the people you love. I don't want you to end up like the pink person in the sketch above.

This is it for today. Time to go back to my fireplace 🔥.

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See you in two weeks, in the meantime, take care of your energy and creativity. Bet on yourself!

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