PromptShelf Is GitHub Gists for Prompts

I keep losing good prompts.

Not the throwaway ones. The useful ones: the image prompt that finally got the lighting right, the little system prompt that made a workflow behave, the version I changed three times before it stopped sounding weird.

They end up in chat history, a Notes file, a screenshot, or nowhere. Then I try to recreate them from memory and get something close, but not quite the thing that worked.

That is why I made PromptShelf.

The idea is basically GitHub Gists, but for prompts. A gist is a small piece of code that is easy to keep to yourself or put somewhere another person can find. Prompts deserve the same treatment. They are tiny artifacts, but they often carry more of the result than the model name does.

In PromptShelf, a prompt can be private, public, or unlisted. Private is for the prompt you are still figuring out. Public is for something you want people to discover. Unlisted is the middle ground: send the link to someone without putting it in the public library.

The part I care about most is history. Prompts are not usually written once. You start with “make a warm editorial illustration,” then add a camera angle, then remove three adjectives, then find the one phrase that makes it work. A good prompt library should remember those revisions instead of pretending the final text appeared fully formed.

It also keeps the connection when someone forks a prompt. If you build on another person’s work, the trail should stay visible. That is more useful than a pile of copied text with no context, and it feels like a nicer default for sharing.

I built it first around the prompts I use for tools like OpenAI image generation, but it is not limited to images. A prompt can be for writing, research, code, roleplay, or the strange tiny workflows that only make sense in your own setup. Tags and collections are there so the shelf does not turn into another junk drawer.

This is deliberately not a prompt marketplace. I do not want every useful prompt to become a product listing with a giant landing page around it. Sometimes you just want a clean little URL, the prompt, the model or tool you used, and enough history to understand why it exists.

PromptShelf is live at promptshelf.liongkj.com. It is still early, but that is the point: I wanted somewhere for the good prompts to live before I lose the next one.