FitWhen to use it — and when not
Use it when
- Repeated tasks with a known shape (emails, briefs, reports)
- Teams that need consistent output across many people
- Onboarding non-technical users to a powerful model
Skip it when
- Open-ended exploration and brainstorming
- When the template has more than ~5 fields — make it a proper form or wizard
AnatomyThe parts of the pattern
- Sentence with slotsThe prompt reads as a sentence; variables are inline dropdowns or fields.
- Smart defaultsEvery slot pre-filled with the most common value.
- Prompt previewThe exact text that will be sent, updated live.
- Run + saveRun now, or save a filled version as a team template.
GuidelinesDo & don’t
Do
- Keep the sentence readable — the template is also documentation.
- Show the assembled prompt so power users trust and learn from it.
- Version templates and show who owns them in a shared library.
Don’t
- Hide the prompt entirely behind a form — people cannot debug what they cannot see.
- Free-text slots where a dropdown would remove ambiguity.
- Let template edits silently change results for the whole team.
In the wildReal-world examples
Notion AIJasperCopy.aiRaycast AI commands
Products named for reference only — no affiliation, and the demo above is an original illustration, not a copy of their UI.
For engineersImplementation notes
- Store templates as data (id, version, slots with types and defaults), never as hard-coded strings in the UI.
- Validate and escape slot values before interpolation — a slot is a prompt-injection entry point.
- Log template id + version with every run so evals can compare versions.