ADR-031: Tagged Prompt Snippet Library
- Status
-
Accepted
- Date
-
2026-06-10
- Authors
-
Netresearch DTT GmbH
Context
Consuming extensions — first nr_repurpose — assemble prompts from
recurring building blocks: a persona, a tone of voice, a target
audience, an image style, a layout instruction. Editors want to manage
these fragments centrally, once, instead of re-typing them into every
extension's own configuration.
The existing Prompt entity does not fit this need. It is
a heavyweight complete prompt: it binds a feature, carries model
parameters (temperature, max tokens, top-p), supports versioning with
parent/variant relations, and tracks usage performance. A persona like
"You are Nova, a friendly expert." has none of these concerns — it is a
fragment that only becomes a prompt when a consumer composes it with
its own instructions. Forcing fragments into Prompt
would either bloat every fragment record with irrelevant model fields
or fork the template semantics depending on a "fragment" flag.
A second question is how consumers select fragments. A fixed category
enum (like Task categories) would require an nr-llm release
every time a consuming extension introduces a new fragment kind, which
contradicts the goal of nr-llm being a shared foundation that consumers
extend without touching it.
Decision
Introduce a separate, lightweight Prompt entity
(table tx_nrllm_promptsnippet) next to — not on top of —
Prompt:
- Fragments, not templates. A snippet is identifier + name +
description + fragment text. No model parameters, no versioning, no
performance tracking.
Promptstays untouched.Template - Free-form CSV tags instead of a category enum. Snippets carry a
comma-separated
tagsfield. Consumers queryPrompt, which matches tags as exact, case-insensitive tokens —Snippet Repository:: find Active By Tag () stylenever matcheslifestyle. The tag vocabulary is a convention between editors and consumers (established so far:audience,tone_of_voice,persona,layout,style), documented in the TCA field description and the administration guide. New fragment kinds need no nr-llm release. - JSON metadata side-channel. An optional
metadataJSON object carries consumer-specific settings (e.g.{"voice": "nova"}on persona snippets so speech features can pick a matching TTS voice).getreturnsMetadata Array () []for empty or invalid JSON — bad editor input must never break a consumer. - Composition stays in nr-llm.
Promptrenders an ordered label-to-snippet map into labeled prompt blocks (Snippet Composer LABEL:+ fragment text, blank-line separated), so all consumers produce uniformly structured prompt sections. - Editing via FormEngine. The backend module gets a "Snippets" list following the established Providers/Models/Tasks pattern; create/edit links into FormEngine, no custom forms.
Consequences
- Editors manage personas, tones, audiences, styles, and layouts once, centrally; every consuming extension reads the same library.
- The free-tag model keeps nr-llm release-independent from consumer vocabulary — at the cost of no referential integrity: a typo in a tag silently yields an empty query result. The documented convention and the tag badges in the list view mitigate this.
- Token matching is implemented over the CSV field in PHP, not SQL
LIKE, guaranteeing exact-token semantics on every database platform. The snippet library is small (tens of records), so loading active snippets for tag filtering is not a performance concern. - Two prompt-related entities now coexist. The split is intentional (template = complete prompt, snippet = fragment) and documented here, in the administration guide, and in both entities' PHPDoc.