Draft — replace with a hook about the day we stopped shipping prompt changes the way we ship copy fixes.
The mindset shift
- What "prompt as a hack" looks like in practice
- Why that mindset breaks the moment you have more than one user persona
- The shift: prompts as a product layer with owners, versions, and a review process
The overlay system at Trywebb
- What the overlay actually is (one base, many category-specific lenses)
- Why we don't fork the whole prompt per category
- A concrete example: how the overlay changes what the financial agent vs. the consumer-app agent looks at
Who owns prompts
- What changed when prompts moved out of "engineer commits a string" territory
- How PM, design, and engineering each touch the prompt layer
- The review surface we wish existed
When prompts are real product surface
- The tell: when a prompt change is indistinguishable from a feature change to the user
- What to instrument so you can tell which one shipped the result
- The trap of treating prompts as code-only when the user-facing impact is product-level