Who owns the prompt?
I gave away a prompt the other day.
But later, I realized it wasn’t just a prompt.
It was the trace of how I think.
The decision tree that led to that line.
The clarity beneath the command.
It wasn’t the output that mattered.
It was the input.
The intention inside the input.
We’re entering an age where the interface between you and the machine is getting thinner.
Where the quality of your thought is judged by what you tell the tool to do.
Where input becomes the new expression.
And the prompt becomes a form of authorship.
So the question is:
Who owns it?
Not the words. The way in.
The micro-frameworks.
The command language.
The trained instincts it takes to write something that gets the result you want, on the first try.
That’s IP.
Even if it’s not registered.
Even if it’s invisible.
Even if someone else runs it through a machine and hits “generate.”
It’s the mark of a mind that knows what it’s doing.
And maybe we need a new layer of authorship for that.
A way to protect the idea behind the idea.
Because the prompt is not just the setup.
Sometimes, it is the idea.
So next time someone asks for the prompt,
ask yourself:
Was that a sentence?
Or was that the system?
And if it was the system,
it deserves a mark.