Linking and Inheritance

Prompts do not exist in isolation. A base prompt for meeting summarization spawns variants: a short-form variant for executive audiences, a technical-detail variant for engineering retrospectives, a formal variant for client-facing summaries. These form a prompt family — related prompts that share a common ancestor and a common purpose.

Prompt families need explicit relationship tracking. The parent_version field in the metadata schema links each variant to its ancestor. This link enables two critical operations: family discovery ("show me all variants of this base prompt") and drift detection ("show me all variants whose parent has been updated but which have not been updated since"). Drift is the silent failure mode in prompt families: the base prompt gets improved, the variants do not, and the family diverges into inconsistency.

# Base prompt
- id: ops-summarize-001
  name: "Meeting Summary — Base"
  version: "2.0.0"
  parent_version: null
  status: active
  intent: "Summarize meeting transcript into structured action items and decisions"
  tags: [operations, summarization, meetings]
  changelog:
    - version: "2.0.0"
      date: "2026-02-15"
      author: "rev-ops-team"
      change: "Restructured output schema to include decision rationale field"

# Variant 1 — inherits from base, customized for executive audience
- id: ops-summarize-002
  name: "Meeting Summary — Executive Brief"
  version: "1.3.0"
  parent_version: "ops-summarize-001@2.0.0"
  status: active
  intent: "Short-form meeting summary for executive distribution, max 200 words"
  tags: [operations, summarization, meetings, executive, short-form]

# Variant 2 — DRIFT WARNING: parent is v2.0.0 but this was last synced at v1.2.0
- id: ops-summarize-003
  name: "Meeting Summary — Engineering Retro"
  version: "1.1.0"
  parent_version: "ops-summarize-001@1.2.0"  # <-- parent has been updated twice since
  status: active
  drift_warning: true
  drift_note: "Parent updated to v2.0.0 on 2026-02-15. Review for decision_rationale field."