Last Saturday at 2pm eastern was the launch of FTT’s monthly Office Hours webinar. It’s a place where you can bring your tech questions to be answered live during the call. This week, we talked about AI, especially prompt generators like Prompt Cowboy.

To be clear, Prompt Cowboy isn’t a LLM program like Claude, Gemini or ChatGpt. Instead, it helps you craft better prompts, that you can then copy into these programs for best results.

Starting Out

You can find Prompt Cowboy at promptcowboy.ai . The opening screen looks like many of the LLM programs out there, with previous prompts in the left column and a text box in the center. The default setting in the text box is to create a standard prompt, however you can change that (dropdown arrow or icons) to a research or analytical prompt among others.

You start by typing your original prompt idea in the text box. For demonstration purposes, let’s use something simple. One of my brick walls is finding the birth certificate/birth town of my great-grandmother, who was an orphan in Italy. I’ll type in “You are an expert in Italian genealogy of the 18th and 19th centuries. Please provide a research plan for searching the surname “Lisbona” among southern Italian orphans during this time period.“

Press enter, or the right arrow, and Prompt Cowboy works it’s magic.

Improvements

Prompt Cowboy structures its prompts into four sections: Situation, Task, Objective, and Knowledge. In this case there is also an additional section – Response Requirements. It takes into account a number of factors, including the political and social realities of the time period, and lists specific document types that would be helpful to consider.

To be clear, I can type in both text boxes to refine both my initial “lazy prompt”, and Prompt Cowboy’s “great prompt” I can also answer a series of questions on the right side to further customize the prompt.

When I’m done, I can click the “Copy” icon, which copies the prompt to my clipboard, and also allows me to open the AI program of my choice. Once I’ve done that, I just paste the improved prompt into the AI’s text box, as I would with any other prompt.

Refine, Refine, Refine

In improving my prompts, Prompt Cowboy is also demonstrating how to craft better prompts. I’m not sure that I’ll ever go into such detail when writing prompts on the fly, but by watching the program dive deep into the details, I can get a better sense of what to focus on in my own prompts.

Best of all, Prompt Cowboy is (currently) free to use, so it costs nothing to give it a try. Let me know how it’s improved your prompts!