The Prompt README Pattern: Make AI Workflows Maintainable

If prompts are programs for language models, a lot of teams are shipping software with no docs. That works for one-off chats. It falls apart the second a prompt becomes part of an actual workflow—something you reuse, hand to a teammate, or revisit two weeks later and barely recognize. The fix is not exotic. It is documentation. More specifically: a Prompt README. A Prompt README is a short document that lives next to a prompt, template, or AI workflow. Its job is to answer the questions people usually leave trapped in chat history: What is this for? What inputs does it expect? What does a good output look like? When should the assistant ask questions instead of guessing? How do I run it again without rediscovering everything from scratch? That sounds almost too simple. Good. Simple patterns are the ones that survive real work. Why prompts become unmaintainable Most prompt failures are not model failures. They are maintenance failures. A prompt works beautifully on day one because the a