Last week you fixed one prompt. Here's the uncomfortable question: could anyone else in your firm find it today? If your best prompts live in one person's chat history, they're not an asset — they're a rumour.

For years, the most valuable know-how in our practice was locked in people's heads. Loz knew exactly how to word a records chaser that actually got a reply. I had a way of explaining a tax bill that headed off the panicked phone call before it came. Useful — and completely unshareable. When Loz was on holiday, his knack went with him.

That's the quiet problem with getting good at AI on your own. Your best prompts end up scattered across your chat history, used once, then gone. You solve the same problem from scratch every single time.

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple, and it's the highest-return hour we've spent all year. We started a shared folder — nothing cleverer than that — and every time someone landed on a prompt that genuinely worked, it went in. A good year-end letter. A firm-but-polite records chaser. A plain-English explainer for a scary HMRC letter. Tested once, written down, there for everyone.

Within a month it changed how the whole team worked. A new starter doesn't need to be brilliant at prompting — they need to open the folder. Their first draft of a client letter is now as good as mine, because they're starting from the same tested prompt I'd have used. One person's good week became everyone's baseline.

Here's the part I didn't see coming: it made us better, too. When a prompt is going into a shared library, you sharpen it. You strip the waffle, add the caveats, make it reusable. Private prompts stay sloppy. Shared ones get polished.

I've come to think this is the real dividing line between firms that get value from AI and firms that just play with it. The players have a hundred clever one-off chats. The ones pulling ahead have a library — an asset that compounds, survives staff turnover, and turns "Aaron's good at AI" into "our firm is good at AI."

You don't need software for it. You need a folder and the discipline to use it. Start this week.

Don't try to boil the ocean. Pick the five writing jobs you do most and template one prompt each, using the Reconciled Prompt Formula — Context + Structure + Output. Ours were:

Write each one properly once, test it on a real (anonymised) job, and tweak until the draft comes back nearly right. Then save all five in one place your whole team already looks — a shared-drive folder, a pinned doc, or a Claude Project if you're on a Team plan. That's the library. It grows from there.

The same task, done properly

Wherever they already look. The tool matters far less than the habit. If your team lives in a shared drive, make a "Prompts" folder. If you're on a Claude or ChatGPT Team plan, save them as reusable Projects or saved prompts so they're one click away. The two things that actually make a library stick: it's in one findable place, and one person owns keeping it tidy.

Here's one to drop straight into the folder. The brackets are the fields you change each time — everything else stays fixed:

Test it on a real job, tune the wording until it sounds like your firm, and that's entry number one. Four more and you've got a library.

Build your first five prompts and save them where the whole team can reach them. Then hit reply and let us know how you got on — tell us which five you picked, and we'll share the ones other firms find most useful.

You've got a library. Next week we point it at the writing that actually eats your time — engagement letters, fee-increase letters, the awkward ones — and how to keep AI-drafted documents compliant.