Someone tweaks one line of the prompt your agent runs on. The next run is worse. A week later nobody can say which edit did it, because the prompt lives in a chat, a Notion page, or a file that never saw version control.
Sound familiar? That is the problem I'm building PromptLikeEngineer for (disclosure: it's my project). Here is what it looks like in practice, in three small steps.
1. Find out what changed
Every committed edit becomes a version (right away from the terminal, when you hit Commit on the web). Pick any two and you see exactly what was added and removed, section by section (role, context, instructions). Red is gone, green is new.
Prefer the terminal? Two commands:
ple log pr-review
ple diff pr-review 1 2
2. Undo without losing anything
The new version is worse? Go back:
ple rollback pr-review 1
Here is the part I like: a rollback doesn't delete anything. It saves the old text as a new version, so the bad edit stays in the history and you can still learn from it.
3. Work on it together
On the Team plan, everyone shares one library and has a role (admin, editor or viewer). Anyone can improve a prompt, and every version shows who made it. "Who changed this?" finally has an answer.
Prompts are plain Markdown. You can add {{variables}} and small {{#if}} blocks, so one prompt can cover a few cases instead of living in four copies:
{{#if focus}}Pay extra attention to: {{focus}}{{/if}}
ple get <name> prints a prompt in the terminal, so you can use it from whatever tool you like. There is also a Claude Code plugin (MCP) that lets an agent read and update prompts. I've only tested that part with Claude Code, so I can't promise more.
What it doesn't do
It keeps track of your prompt text. It doesn't run the prompt and it doesn't check whether the output got better. One reader pointed out that the strongest setup keeps a small test example next to the prompt, so every change is tried on a realistic input before it ships. That part is still on you, and I'd love to hear how you handle it.
Want to poke at it?
You can save, compare and roll back a prompt right in your browser, no account needed: promptlikeengineer.com/try. It's early, so tell me what's missing.
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