Production Prompt Release Checklist

Use this before changing a prompt that affects customers, operations, regulated data, or business records.

Prompt Metadata

• Prompt name:
• Feature:
• Owner:
• Reviewer:
• Current version:
• Candidate version:
• Model:
• Release date:

Architecture

• System, developer, and user/context layers are separated.
• User-provided content is clearly delimited.
• Dynamic data is not stored in the system prompt.
• Templates are versioned in source control or a prompt service.
• Sensitive production traces are not committed to source control.

Output Contract

• Output schema is defined.
• Empty, malformed, or partial output has a fallback path.
• The application validates output before taking action.
• Low-confidence or ambiguous cases escalate to a human.

Safety

• Prompt injection risks were reviewed.
• Tool calls are scoped to allowed actions.
• Customer-visible, financial, legal, HR, or destructive actions require approval.
• Secrets and personal data are redacted from logs where required.

Evals

• Regression set passed.
• Safety cases passed.
• Known previous failures remained fixed.
• Candidate did not reduce the primary quality metric beyond tolerance.

Observability

• Prompt template name and version are logged.
• Model, latency, tokens, and cost are logged.
• Inputs and outputs are redacted or sampled according to policy.
• Post-release review owner is assigned.

Rollback

• Previous version is available.
• Rollback can happen without code surgery.
• Stop condition is documented.
• On-call or owner knows how to disable the feature.

Decision

• Approved:
• Approved by:
• Notes: