Ask HN: Am I disloyal for not wanting to share my system prompts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Am I disloyal for not wanting to share my system prompts?

1 pointkkarpkkarp10 comments

Let's say your employer requires you to share system prompts you've created for daily work with code: do you share them or not?

Everywhere (at conferences, in various GH repos) I see people completely freely sharing their ways of using AI. Employees of several companies I've recently passed through without any second thought put their guardrails into shared repos, prompts for how to do code self-review. Hell: manual testers are currently sitting and writing an entire agent that will replace them once completed.

For me this is shooting yourself in the foot: the prompts I've developed over the last dozen or so months are one of the few things that make me even slightly irreplaceable.

Am I thinking correctly, or am I overreacting?

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> Am I thinking correctly

No, you're not. Company time + company resources = company property. Company project = company property. No code within any given company belongs to one person, but belongs to (spoiler alert!) the company.

If you want to develop voodoo to make you irreplaceable, do it in the context of your own projects, with your own resources, on your own time.

PS: there may well be legal reason that they require the prompts. e.g. to ensure that you're not injecting materials owned by someone else. They are perfectly justified in demanding access to every byte which goes into their software, documents, infrastructure, etc.

If you build or use something during work hours, and you're a coder coding, it seems pretty obvious to me that the company owns it.

Don't fall in love with the code you wrote to do the work you did there. It's part of the process. Someone will have to maintain it well after you're gone.

I am not talking about code, the code obviously belongs to the company, this is something what I have in contract.

But I don't have anything in the contract about sharing my self-improvement skills and I consider my AI framework (cursor commands I created to not repeat myself, claude/cursor skills, system prompts - everything what makes me to generate code fast) as an acceleration of my work as developer.

If I leave without sharing this, company will continue develop the code I created/generated.

If I share this, I am losing my only handicap in the AI-era: they could take my A framework and the next developer will just type `/fix-issue gh 1243` and have the same result as I do have now.

The `/fix-issue` command is something I created months ago, and I am constantly improving so at this point the first, at most third, result is the code which goes through code review with suggestion-level insights and QA team can't find any bug.

I am not exaggerating. That command is really complex and loads plenty of skills (also mine) and md files (still mine, kept out of the repo) - in total it is like ~12 A4 pages text (I actually counted it now). This is basically my coding approach ported into AI.

Did you create it on company time?

To elaborate: I have never been requested to share my prompts/skills, like: strongly demanded to do this. It has been vague suggestions from managers to all employees sometimes to share them but while many happily started doing this, I simply ignored it like I never heard it. Sometimes on dailies I hear PM cheer my AI skills and asks how I do this, but I only smile and joke "magic", at most tell them my prompts are always elaborative.

I am more surprised why people are sharing this without thinking.

what if this is a mix?

I am now independent contractor and parts are created on company A time, other parts on company B time and different parts at my own time. And so on, and so on. And you can't tell which one is which. For the new company I start as contractor I come with my AI framework, and I am adjusting it on daily basis. What then?

I am now hired by many companies because they know giving me task means it will be done in a day, not a week, and they know it is because I know "how to AI". (I am not perfect, but I work with other guys and I am surprised how inefficient they are when it comes to AI, but this is a different story)

You came here searching for an answer. The problem is you wanted one specific answer, one that validates your own stance. So now if someone gives you an answer that doesn't sit well with you, you will try to convince them that you're right anyway for whatever reason you want.

Discussing this seems useless.

fair point, but it is because the discussion drifted to legal while I wanted to discuss more "how do you feel about sharing your AI moat"

In terms of legal, f* no, I am not going to consider my tool adjustments as part of companies properties :)

We can discuss but I will stand my ground: my AI skills - even written on a disc - belongs to me. Same, if I go to car paint garage to have my paint fixed I am not expecting the painter will reveal his method to get the perfect color or give me his notes where he self-described "how to paint".

Before "AI era" we all had our own system scripts, manually crafted in bash/python, to make repeating task automated. And then it was never a question to share it: the scripts are the way how I configure/tune my computer and how I get advantage over other developers. The .cloude/.cursor directory is the same.

> Am I thinking correctly, or am I overreacting?

I guess it depends on the details of your employment contract, but typically (and by common sense) any work you do that you are being paid for, or was done using company equipment or resources, belongs to the company and not you. Based on what you've said here, I'd say that your stance is incorrect.

I understand the concern, it feels like they are taking the last thing you had left. But in honesty, whatever you think your moat is will surely be gone in a few model iterations. And even if it's not, do you really think you own any text on the screen of your work computer?

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