Before you ship a prompt box

1. 01We can state what this feature does in one sentence a user would actually say back to us.If your sentence contains “leverage” or “intelligent,” it fails.
2. 02We have written down three things the feature explicitly does NOT do.The limits list is the contract. No limits list, no ship.
3. 03The empty state shows real, clickable starting points — not a blank box and a placeholder.Prompt starters drawn from actual user tasks, tested against the live model.
4. 04Every prompt starter we show has been run against the production model and produces a good result.A suggested prompt that returns garbage is a self-inflicted trust wound.
5. 05We know where in the existing workflow this feature appears, and why there.Contextual entry points beat a global sparkle button. Name the moment of need.
6. 06A first-time user can tell this output is AI-generated without reading a tooltip.If it looks like a human wrote it, you’ve made a promise you can’t keep.
7. 07We have defined what the user must provide (context, files, selection) versus what the system infers.If the answer is “it just knows,” someone is hiding a failure mode.
8. 08The failure copy exists — the message shown when the model can’t help is written and reviewed.Failure copy written after launch is written by support tickets.
9. 09We have named the user’s cost of a wrong answer here, in concrete terms.“Mild annoyance” and “sent the wrong contract” demand different designs.
10. 10Someone has used a competitor or adjacent product (Claude, ChatGPT, Notion AI) for this exact task and reported back.

Discussion prompts

• If we removed the word “AI” from every surface of this feature, what would we call it — and is that name honest?
• What is the single most common request users will type that this feature cannot handle? Who on this team disagrees about that?
• Would we ship this feature if the model were 20% worse than it is today? If not, we are shipping a demo, not a product.
• Where does this feature’s promise exceed its evidence? Point to the specific copy.
• Who is the user that should NOT use this feature, and does anything in the design tell them so?