The must-and-never split: your working prompt, cut into boxes and evals

Ember Console is a session-report builder for coaches, in closed beta at $8 a month with 5 free sessions a month. The prompt you paste with every transcript is already two documents: the lines that ask for writing, and the lines that say must or never. The first set becomes one prompt per section of your report, and the second becomes the check beside it. Call that cut the must-and-never split.

How do you make the must-and-never split?

Cut the prompt where your report’s sections already sit, and keep the leftovers.

1. Print the prompt you paste every week.
2. Mark each sentence with the section it serves.
3. Sentences that serve no section are your standard.
4. Make one box per section, in report order.
5. Paste that section’s sentences into its box prompt.
6. Turn each must and never line into that box’s eval.

Your letterhead sits in the template, so the top of the old paste comes out too. Ember’s landing page names the same pile: “Stop managing recordings, letterheads, language preferences, and AI prompts by hand.”

Which lines in your prompt are evals, not instructions?

The ones that describe a finished section rather than asking for one. Must, never, always, no more than.

OpenAI’s page on creating and editing GPTs keeps both jobs in one field: instructions cover what a GPT should do, how it should respond and what it should avoid, and they apply to every conversation. For a GPT with one output, that is the right shape. A report has sections, and two sections rarely finish on the same terms.

One r/ChatGPT poster wants a way “to just save and reuse” the ones that worked, and another asks the same about reusing one with different inputs. Two accounts, not a count of how anyone works.

What a box holds after the split is the box system. Writing the standard stays your job, and the honest zero is my attempt at one a coach can set without a license.

What is not stated yet?

The fact sheet for this feature is empty, so I will not pretend the last stretch is documented. Four unanswered questions:

1. What a box is, exactly.
2. How many boxes a default template starts with, and whether you can add, remove or reorder them.
3. What an eval can check: length, wording, the presence of a fact, or a rule you typed.
4. What happens to a box that fails: how many reworks, and what you see while it runs.

Answer those four and the split becomes a setup guide. Until then it is a way of reading a prompt you have been trusting for months.

So make the split on paper this week. Two clean piles mean a template drafted from something you already trust. One pile means the standard was never written down, and that is the part to write first.

Questions people ask next?

What custom instructions should I give ChatGPT?

Whatever you would otherwise retype every week: the role, the shape of each section, and the lines that say must or never. OpenAI’s page on creating GPTs says instructions cover what a GPT should do and what it should avoid.

Can ChatGPT remember my prompt between chats?

OpenAI’s help pages say custom instructions apply immediately to all chats, so that part needs no paste. Two r/ChatGPT posters still want a cleaner place to keep one. Ember holds one prompt and one eval per box instead.

What does Ember Console cost in the closed beta?

$8 a month, with 5 free sessions a month. It is a session-report builder for coaches, and the beta is closed, so there is nothing to sign up for yet.