Decision #005

Prompt templates as files in the repo

superseded accepted 2026-03-16 superseded 2026-05-21 by carla
superseded by ADR-007

Prompts are behavior. In the prototype they were string constants scattered through the assistant package, edited ad hoc and impossible to diff against an incident.

Keep every prompt as a versioned file under backend/prompts/, loaded at startup. Changing a prompt is a code review.

Prompt changes became reviewable and bisectable. But a prompt fix rides the full deploy train — during the April carrier outage a one-line prompt patch took 40 minutes to ship. Superseded by the registry approach in ADR-007.