Prompt factory
- Practitioner slang
A prompt factory is an informal brainstorming method in which you describe a role, goal, process, or recurring problem and the AI proposes many candidate prompts or workflows to try.
The model draws on what you tell it and on patterns common to jobs like yours. A long list takes it seconds, because each idea only has to sound plausible. Whether one helps depends on facts the model never saw, such as which tasks fill your week and what goes wrong in them.
Where you’ll meet it
You manage a small office and ask an AI for ways it could help. It returns thirty ideas, from a staff newsletter to a front-desk chatbot. Ordering supplies takes your whole Friday afternoon, and none of the thirty touches it.
What to do
Ask again, this time starting from the lost Friday afternoon. Say what you order, where the requests come from, and where the job usually stalls, then ask for ideas of what an AI could take on anywhere in it.
Easy to mix up
| Prompt factory | Meta-prompting |
|---|---|
| No, you want ideas for what to hand over | Yes, you want better instructions for it |
Check yourself
A prompt factory gives you twenty ideas for your job. Which should you test first?
Go deeperAsk how each idea could fail, and allow fixes with no AI
Ask for each idea's inputs, its expected output, and the likeliest way it fails. An idea that needs information you don't have, or breaks where your current method already breaks, can then be dropped before you spend a week on it.
Some chores shrink more from a shared order form or a saved reply than from any prompt. Telling the model it may suggest fixes like these puts them on the list beside the prompts.