pattern playground

Prompt scaffolding

Added · Seed

Seeded from looking at different AI pattern libraries and sorting them out. It’s not quite ready yet because I haven’t had a chance to consider it closely.

The open request is given structure — fields, slots, controls, quality feedback — so the actor composes a complete request without having to already know what completeness looks like.

Forms

Recurring forms along an abstraction ladder: example prompts and fill-in-the-blank passages, structured prompts with labelled fields, paginated composition, configured controls (tone, persona, parameters) replacing free text, and pre-submission quality feedback or enhancement.

Consequences

  • the request's expected shape is externalised — labelled fields, fillable slots, controls — so completeness is inspectable before anything runs
  • structure narrows expression: what the scaffold doesn't ask for tends not to get said, and the actor's stranger intents stop fitting the form
  • a scaffold encodes somebody's yesterday's idea of a good request, and keeps proposing it until the encoding is revisited

Resources & references

Appears in

The encounter

  • Carrying the business, step 2 — within Frame the goal-shaped request: structure for composing a complete request without already knowing what a complete one contains

Delegating work

  • Handing the work over, step 1 — within Write the request: slots and feedback on the request, for an actor who does not yet know what a complete request contains

Related patterns

Instantiates

  • Prompt — a structured way of composing the request — one end of the open-to-scaffolded spectrum
  • Template — the template pattern applied to requests

Enacts

  • Learnability — occupying the scaffold teaches what a good request contains

Complements

  • Suggestion — starters and example prompts seed the scaffold's slots

Related to

  • Wizard — paginated scaffolds are the wizard applied to prompting
  • Form — at full structure the scaffold simply is a form whose output is a request
  • Validation — prompt-quality feedback is validation applied before the request runs
  • Rule composition — both give an unstructured intent a structure to be composed in; the scaffold shapes one request, rule composition shapes a condition that stands

Enabled by

  • Bounded choice — each slot of the scaffold is an act of bounded choice over one part of the request