Prompt Hoarding
ELI5 - The Vibe Check
You've written the perfect prompt. It gets exactly the output you want, every time, and you've saved it in a private notes file you have never once shared with the team. Prompt hoarding is treating your best prompts like trade secrets, because in a world where output quality depends heavily on input quality, a great prompt genuinely feels like a competitive advantage.
Real Talk
Prompt hoarding is the tendency to keep effective, well-tuned prompts private rather than sharing them with a team, often because a developer perceives their prompting skill as a differentiator worth protecting. It runs counter to the collaborative norms most engineering cultures value and is increasingly called out as a form of knowledge silo.
When You'll Hear This
"He's prompt hoarding again, that onboarding doc he generated was clearly from a template he won't share." / "We should ban prompt hoarding and put the good ones in a shared repo."
Related Terms
Documentation
Documentation is written explanation of how your code works and why.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of talking to AI so it actually does what you want.
Prompt Envy
A coworker pastes their prompt in Slack and it's this beautifully structured thing with numbered constraints, examples, and a clear persona, and yours was...
Prompt Template
A prompt template is a fill-in-the-blanks prompt for AI — you write the structure once with placeholders, then swap in different values each time.
Tribal Knowledge
Tribal knowledge is the stuff that only exists in people's heads — the undocumented rules, workarounds, and 'you just have to know' context that's never wr...