Prompt Ship Review
Review a system prompt against a ship bar for clarity, structure, ambiguity, injection surface, and named failure modes. Use when asked if a prompt is ready to ship, to review a system prompt, or to score injection surface and rewrites.
Copy the file into your agent runtime. Cursor loads personal skills from ~/.cursor/skills/prompt-ship-review/SKILL.md and project skills from .cursor/skills/prompt-ship-review/SKILL.md. Claude Code looks in .claude/skills/prompt-ship-review/SKILL.md.
Prompt Ship Review
When to use
A system prompt (optionally with a tool list) needs a structured review before production. Triggers: is this prompt ready, review this system prompt, check injection surface.
What it does
Scores the prompt against a fixed rubric and returns concrete rewrites. Aligns with ARC Labs Prompt Reviewer: clarity/structure, ambiguity phrases, OWASP LLM01-aligned injection surface, named failure modes, tool policy.
Steps
- Check for a clear contract: role, objective, must / never rules.
- Check structure: sections or delimiters so instructions and untrusted data do not blur.
- List weasel phrases ("be helpful", "when needed", "use your judgment") with a replacement for each.
- Check injection surface: instruction priority, trust boundary, untrusted-data framing, no secrets in-prompt.
- Name failure modes: refuse, clarify-or-stop, human gate for high-impact tools.
- If tools are present, require scoped descriptions and a gate on destructive actions.
- Emit letter-grade style findings plus paste-ready rewrite blocks.
Output
- Overall: ship / ship-with-fixes / do-not-ship
- Findings table: check, status (pass/warn/fail), evidence, rewrite
- Failure modes: covered vs gap
- One rewritten prompt skeleton if the original is salvageable
Guardrails
Scoring is heuristic. A high grade means the prompt *states* the right defenses, not that a live model is unbreakable. Never invent tool behavior that is not in the tool list. Do not put secrets, API keys, or production credentials into the rewritten prompt.