I built Git for AI prompts — here's why and how A developer built promptctl, an open-source CLI tool that brings Git-like version control to AI prompt management. The tool allows users to commit, diff, rollback, search, and watch prompts from the terminal, addressing the common problem of tracking prompt changes across scattered files and documents. Every engineer I know who builds with LLMs has the same problem. You spend hours tuning a system prompt. It's working great. You tweak it a little. Then a little more. Then something breaks — the model starts giving worse answers, hallucinating more, ignoring your instructions. And you have absolutely no idea what you changed. Your prompt history is scattered across files, Notion docs, Slack messages, and git commits buried inside application code. There's no clean way to see what changed, when, or why — let alone get back to the version that was actually working. So I built promptctl https://github.com/naya-ai/promptctl . promptctl is a CLI tool that brings the git mental model to prompt management. You commit versions, diff them, roll back, search across them — all from the terminal. bash $ echo "You are a helpful assistant." | promptctl commit system -m "initial" ✓ Committed prompt "system" as v1 $ echo "You are a helpful assistant. Always cite sources." | promptctl commit system -m "added citation" ✓ Committed prompt "system" as v2 $ promptctl diff system --- system v1 2026-06-01 09:12 +++ system v2 2026-06-03 14:47 - You are a helpful assistant. + You are a helpful assistant. Always cite sources. $ promptctl rollback system 1 -m "citation hurt recall" ✓ Rolled back "system" to v1 → saved as v3 If you've used git, you already know how to use promptctl. You can pipe from stdin, read from a file, or type interactively: From stdin echo "You are a helpful assistant." | promptctl commit system -m "initial" From a file — best for longer prompts promptctl commit system --file prompts/system.txt -m "from file" Tag with the model it was written for promptctl commit classifier -m "optimized for speed" --model gpt-4o-mini --tag prod bash $ promptctl log system --preview prompt: system ────────────────────────────────────────────────── v3 2026-06-24 19:41:34 citation hurt recall 1 lines, 5 words, 28 chars "You are a helpful assistant." v2 2026-06-24 19:41:25 added citation 1 lines, 8 words, 49 chars "You are a helpful assistant. Always cite sources." v1 2026-06-24 19:41:25 initial 1 lines, 5 words, 28 chars "You are a helpful assistant." promptctl diff system latest vs previous promptctl diff system 2 v2 vs latest promptctl diff system 1 3 explicit comparison Diffs are colorized — red for removed lines, green for added. bash $ promptctl search "cite sources" Results for "cite sources" ────────────────────────────────────────────────── system v2 2026-06-24 19:41 added citation …You are a helpful assistant. Always cite source… Search checks content, commit messages, and tags. This one's my favorite. Point it at a file and it auto-commits every time you save: promptctl watch prompts/system.txt --as system --model claude-3 Now you can edit in your normal editor and every save is a versioned snapshot. The commit timestamp matches the file's modification time, not when promptctl ran. promptctl copy system system-experimental fork with full history promptctl show system --copy copy to clipboard promptctl show system --version-at 2026-06-01 time travel promptctl export system history.md full markdown export promptctl stats store-wide overview promptctl prune system --keep 10 housekeeping Everything is stored in .promptctl/store.json in your project directory — similar to how .git/ works. The store is discovered by walking up parent directories, so commands work from any subdirectory. your-project/ ├── .promptctl/ │ └── store.json ← all prompt versions live here ├── src/ └── ... Commit store.json to git and your whole team shares prompt history. Or add .promptctl/ to .gitignore if you want a local-only store. Writes are atomic — we write to a temp file and rename, so you never get a corrupt store even if the process is killed mid-write. I wanted promptctl to be a tool you install once and forget about. No runtime required, no node modules , no pip install , no version conflicts. Go's standard library covers everything promptctl needs: The result is a single binary you install with: go install github.com/naya-ai/promptctl/cmd/promptctl@latest And it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Bash source < promptctl completion bash Zsh source < promptctl completion zsh Fish promptctl completion fish ~/.config/fish/completions/promptctl.fish Completions dynamically suggest your prompt names for every command that takes a