Codify Your Judgment into Prompts (Don't Repeat Yourself)
Turn every piece of feedback you give into a reusable prompt so you never say it twice
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
A huge share of a founder's or manager's job is repeating the same feedback — how to write a headline, how to structure an intro, what good taste looks like. Shipper's approach is to treat repetition as a defect: every recurring judgment gets codified into a prompt. This 'pushes your taste out to the edge' so work is pre-filtered by a simulation of you before it reaches you, and lets people you mentor internalize corrections permanently.
Origin
Dan Shipper's personal quarterly goal at Every ('don't repeat yourself'), applied to editorial feedback on their daily newsletter and to mentoring junior writers like Alex Duffy.
Core principles
- 01So much of a leader's job is just repeating yourself — that is the waste to eliminate
- 02A prompt can't perfectly mimic you, but it can push your taste to the edge so people talk to a simulation of you first
- 03Capture feedback at the moment you give it, verbatim, then encode it
- 04The learner side: record every correction and put it into a prompt so the same mistake is never made twice
How to run it
- 1
Set repetition-elimination as an explicit goal
Make 'don't repeat myself' a stated objective so you actively notice when you're giving the same feedback again.
Pro tip Shipper sets only one or two quarterly goals; this was a whole quarter's focus, signaling how much leverage it holds.
- 2
Capture the feedback as you give it
When you explain how to tell a story, write a headline, or judge an idea, record it rather than letting it evaporate.
Pro tip Have the person you're mentoring record the session and transcribe it into a prompt themselves.
- 3
Codify it into a reusable prompt or style guide
Turn the captured judgment into a prompt (e.g. a copy-edit prompt built from a style guide) that applies your standard automatically.
Pro tip With a capable model, a style guide plus a prompt can run copy edits across everything you write.
- 4
Route work through the prompt before it reaches you
People submit work to the simulation-of-you first, so by the time you see it, it has already cleared your codified taste.
Watch out The hard part is behavioral, not technical — you must get people to actually run their work through the prompt every time ('Did you put this through the prompt yet?').
In the wild
Alex Duffy joined with good ideas but wasn't yet a strong writer. Every time Shipper sat with him and explained how to tell a story or think about a headline, Duffy recorded all of it, put it into a prompt, and never made the same mistake twice.
→ Shipper says Duffy made 'a year's worth of progress in like two months.'
Rather than personally giving feedback on every headline and intro for Every's daily newsletter, Shipper codified that feedback into prompts. Writers who couldn't get his time talked to 'a simulation of a simulation of me' first.
→ Feedback quality scaled beyond Shipper's personal availability without him repeating himself.
Common mistakes
Building the prompt but not changing behavior
The prompt is worthless if people don't use it. Shipper stresses the organizational challenge of getting people to actually run work through the codified prompt every time.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders, editors, and managers who spend hours re-explaining the same craft feedback and want to scale their taste across a team
Not ideal for
Judgment that is genuinely case-by-case and can't be generalized into a repeatable standard
From the transcript
“one of my big goals for us last quarter was don't repeat yourself”
“it's really stunning how much of your job is just repeating yourself”
“we've started to codify all that into prompts”
“it pushes my taste out to the edge so that um writers who are not able to talk to”
“he recorded all of it, put it into a prompt, and like he never made the same mistake twice”
From the episode
The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code
Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every)