Most people who use ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini every day already have a prompt collection. It's usually a notes doc. Maybe a pinned note, maybe a page in a wiki, maybe a text file on the desktop. It grew one paste at a time, and it works well enough that nobody thinks about it.
This isn't an argument against that doc. Notes apps are good at what they were built for. The argument is narrower: a notes doc is a fine place to store a prompt and an awkward place to reuse one, and reuse is the only reason to keep a prompt at all.
What a prompt collection is actually for
A prompt you keep has one job: to be used again, on a new piece of work, with roughly the same result as last time. Everything else (naming, sorting, tagging) only matters if it makes that next use faster or more reliable.
So the useful question isn't "where can I put prompts?" Anywhere can hold text. The question is "what happens between deciding to reuse a prompt and seeing the reply?"
The reuse path, step by step
Picture the notes route. You're in a chat tab and want the prompt you used for, say, turning a long thread into a short status update.
- Leave the chat tab and open the notes app.
- Find the right note, then the right section of it.
- Work out which of the similar-looking versions is the current one.
- Copy it, come back, paste it, and fix anything that came across oddly.
None of those steps is hard. Together they're enough friction that a lot of people just type a rougher version of the request instead. That's the quiet cost of a notes collection: not lost prompts, but prompts that are technically saved and practically skipped.
Three ways a notes collection drifts
Copies multiply. The prompt gets tweaked in a chat, the tweak works, and the improved version never makes it back to the doc. Or it does, pasted underneath the old one. After a few rounds you have three near-identical blocks and no record of which one you'd trust.
Formatting gets "helped". Some editors turn straight quotes into curly ones, convert lines starting with a dash into bullets, or reflow spacing. For most notes that's harmless. For a prompt where structure carries meaning, it's a small, silent edit.
Search is tuned for documents, not tasks. Notes search finds words you remember typing. When you go back for a prompt, you often remember the job ("the one for status updates"), not the wording, and the note might be titled something else entirely.
None of these is a disaster. They're slow leaks, and they all land at the moment of reuse.
What a better home for working prompts needs
Strip it down and a home for prompts that already worked needs four things:
- It lives where the work happens. For most people that's the browser, next to the chat.
- It finds by job, not just by title. Tags or descriptions that match how you'll look for it later.
- It gets the prompt into the chat without a copy-paste round trip, so reuse costs less than retyping.
- It's the same library on every machine you work on, so there's one current version instead of a copy per laptop.
You can get partway there with a well-kept notes doc and some discipline. Plenty of people do, and if that's you, keep going.
Where PromptAlo fits
I build PromptAlo, a free Chrome extension that does those four things for prompts that already worked. You save a prompt from the browser into your library. AI tags are added so you can find it by what it's for. A saved prompt goes into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with one click. The library syncs across your devices. If a prompt is worth giving away, you can share it to a public community library, and on Pro an AI quality review checks it for personal data before it's published.
If you want to try it against your current notes doc, it's free on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/promptalo/jlfoipkmagdoafhlkhfkakdankpjhgni?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=brand_post&utm_campaign=w4-fri-devto-store
When a notes doc is honestly enough
To be fair to the notes app:
- If you reuse a handful of prompts, rarely, a single note is fine.
- If your prompts are mostly one-offs, there's nothing to reuse, so nothing to optimise.
- If you already keep one clean version per prompt and paste it without thinking, your reuse path is short already.
The case for a dedicated vault gets stronger as three things grow: how many prompts you lean on, how often you go back to them, and how many chat tools you switch between.
A question for you
Where do your working prompts live right now, and what's the most annoying step between "I need that prompt" and seeing the reply?
This post was written with AI assistance and edited by the PromptAlo team.
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