promptrace

Git-style version control for LLM prompts.

Version, diff, and roll back prompts locally from your terminal.

npm install -g promptrace

The Problem

You're iterating on a system prompt. It was working great last week. You changed something, tone, structure, a single sentence, and now outputs are worse. You don't remember exactly what you changed. There's no diff. No history. No way back.

Most teams manage prompts in a Notion doc, a .txt file, or hardcoded strings in the repo. When something breaks, there's no audit trail.

promptrace fixes that.

Demo

$ promptrace init
Initialized empty promptrace repo in .promptrace/

$ promptrace add qol/tutor/feedback "You are an Arabic tutor. Correct mistakes clearly."
Added 'qol/tutor/feedback' -> v1

$ promptrace add qol/tutor/feedback "You are an Arabic tutor. Correct mistakes gently. Be encouraging."
Added 'qol/tutor/feedback' -> v2

$ promptrace log qol/tutor/feedback
History for 'qol/tutor/feedback':

v2, 2026-07-01 12:22:34
  You are an Arabic tutor. Correct mistakes gently. Be encouraging.

v1, 2026-07-01 12:18:17
  You are an Arabic tutor. Correct mistakes clearly.

$ promptrace diff qol/tutor/feedback 1 2
Diff 'qol/tutor/feedback': v1 -> v2

You are an Arabic tutor. Correct mistakes [clearly -> gently]. Be encouraging.

$ promptrace rollback qol/tutor/feedback --to 1
Rolled back 'qol/tutor/feedback' to v1 -> saved as v3

Commands

| Command | Description | |---|---| | promptrace init | Initialize a repo in the current directory | | promptrace add <name> <prompt> | Add or update a prompt (auto-increments version) | | promptrace log <name> | Show full version history for a prompt | | promptrace diff <name> <v1> <v2> | Word-level diff between two versions | | promptrace rollback <name> --to <v> | Roll back to a previous version (non-destructive) |

How It Works

Running promptrace init creates a .promptrace/ directory in your project with a local SQLite database. All prompt history is stored there, no cloud, no auth, no setup.

Add .promptrace/ to .gitignore to keep it local, or commit it to share prompt history with your team.

Prompt Naming

Use namespaced names to organize prompts across a project:

myapp/summarizer/system
myapp/classifier/user
myapp/onboarding/day1

Any string works, slashes are just a convention for readability.

Roadmap

• [ ] promptrace list, list all tracked prompts
• [ ] promptrace diff --semantic, embedding-based semantic diff
• [ ] Commit messages (promptrace add <name> <prompt> -m "soften tone")
• [ ] Remote sync for team sharing
• [ ] SDK: pull versioned prompts at runtime

License

MIT