AI Prompts | Settings
Customize the AI instructions for each pipeline stage with your own prompts.
4 min read
What you'll learn
- How the custom prompt system works
- How to create and manage prompts
- How prompt resolution priority works
- How team prompt locking works
Overview
Ergate's AI pipeline uses prompts at each of the four stages (Analysis, Scoping, Writing, Scoring) to guide what the AI generates. By default, Ergate uses built-in prompts optimized for general proposal writing. With custom prompts, you can override these defaults to tailor the AI output for your specific industry, style, or workflow.
Navigate to Settings → AI Prompts to manage your prompt library.
Custom prompts require a Solo plan or higher. See Plans for prompt limits by plan.
Creating a prompt
Click New Prompt and fill in:
- Name — a descriptive name (e.g., "SaaS Technical Analysis" or "Friendly Tone Writer")
- Stage — which pipeline stage this prompt applies to: Analysis, Scoping, Writing, or Scoring
- Content — the prompt instructions the AI will follow
Clone from built-in
Don't want to start from scratch? Click Clone Built-in to copy the default prompt for any stage. This gives you a proven starting point that you can customize to your needs.
Variable substitution
Prompts support dynamic variables that are replaced with your profile data at generation time:
{{industry}}— your selected industry{{skills}}— your skills list{{hourlyRate}}— your default hourly rate{{currency}}— your preferred currency{{pricingModel}}— your default pricing model
Use these variables to make your prompts adapt automatically to your profile settings.
Managing prompts
Version history
Every time you save changes to a prompt, a new version is created. You can:
- View the full history of changes
- Compare versions side by side
- Restore any previous version
This means you can experiment freely — you can always revert if a change doesn't produce the results you want.
Setting defaults
For each pipeline stage, you can set one prompt as your default. Click Set as Default on any prompt to make it the automatic choice for that stage in all new proposals.
The default prompt is used unless you explicitly select a different one when creating a proposal.
Per-proposal overrides
When creating a proposal, you can override the default prompt for any stage. This lets you use different prompts for different types of projects without changing your global defaults.
Prompt resolution priority
When Ergate runs the pipeline, it determines which prompt to use for each stage using this priority chain:
- Team lock — if a team owner/admin has locked a prompt for a stage, it's used for all team members (Agency plan)
- Explicit selection — the prompt you selected when creating this specific proposal
- User default — your personal default prompt for this stage
- Team default — your team's default prompt (Agency plan)
- Built-in — Ergate's default system prompt
The first match in this chain wins. This gives you fine-grained control while ensuring there's always a fallback.
Team prompt locking
On the Agency plan, team owners and admins can lock a prompt for any pipeline stage. When a stage is locked:
- All team members must use the locked prompt for that stage
- Members cannot override the locked prompt when creating proposals
- This ensures consistent output quality across the team
Locking is useful when you want to enforce a standard analysis methodology, pricing approach, or writing style across all proposals your agency produces.
Prompt limits
| Plan | Prompt limit | |------|-------------| | Free | 0 | | Solo | 4 | | Pro | 12 | | Agency | Unlimited |
Start by cloning the built-in prompts and making small adjustments. Test each change by generating a proposal and comparing the output. Iterative refinement produces better results than rewriting from scratch.