Brad Menezes, CEO of enterprise vibe coding startup Superblocks, believes the following crop of billion-dollar startup concepts are hiding in virtually plain sight: the system prompts utilized by present unicorn AI startups.
System prompts are the prolonged prompts — over 5,000-6,000 phrases — that AI startups use to instruct the foundational fashions from firms like OpenAI or Anthropic on how you can generate their application-level AI merchandise. They’re, in Menezes view, like a grasp class in immediate engineering.
“Each single firm has a totally totally different system immediate for a similar [foundational] mannequin,” he advised TechCrunch. “They’re making an attempt to get the mannequin to do precisely what’s required for a particular area, particular duties.”
System prompts aren’t precisely hidden. Prospects can ask many AI instruments to share theirs. However they aren’t at all times publicly obtainable.
In order a part of his personal startup’s new product announcement of an enterprise coding AI agent named Clark, Superblocks provided to share a file of 19 system prompts from a few of the hottest AI coding merchandise like Windsurf, Manus, Cursor, Lovable and Bolt.
Menezes’s tweet went viral, seen by virtually 2 million together with large names within the Valley like Sam Blond, previously of Founders Fund and Brex, and Aaron Levie, a Superblocks investor. Superblocks introduced final week that it raised a $23 million Collection A extension spherical, bringing its complete Collection A to $60 million for its vibe coding instruments geared to non-developers at enterprises.
So we requested Menezes to stroll us via how you can examine different’s system prompts to glean insights.
“I’d say the largest studying for us constructing Clark and studying via the system prompts is that the system immediate itself is perhaps 20% of the key sauce,” Menezes defined. This immediate offers the LLM the baseline of what to do.
The opposite 80% is “immediate enrichment” he mentioned, which is the infrastructure a startup builds across the calls to the LLM. That half contains directions it attaches to a person’s immediate, and actions taken when returning the response, comparable to checking for accuracy.
Roles, context and instruments
He mentioned there are three elements of system prompts to review: position prompting, contextual prompting, and power use.
The very first thing to note is that, whereas system prompts are written in pure language, they’re exceptionally particular. “You mainly have to talk as should you would to a human co-worker,” Menezes mentioned. “And the directions must be excellent.”
Position prompting helps the LLMs be constant, giving each goal and character. As an illustration, Devin’s begins with, “You’re Devin, a software program engineer utilizing an actual laptop working system. You’re a actual code-wiz: few programmers are as proficient as you at understanding codebases, writing useful and clear code, and iterating in your modifications till they’re appropriate.”
Contextual prompting offers the fashions the context to contemplate earlier than appearing. It ought to present guardrails that may, as an example, scale back prices and guarantee readability on duties.
Cursor’s instructs, “Solely name instruments when wanted, and by no means point out device names to the person — simply describe what you’re doing. … don’t present code until requested. … Learn related file content material earlier than enhancing and repair clear errors, however don’t guess or loop fixes greater than 3 times.”
Instrument use permits agentic duties as a result of it instructs the fashions how you can transcend simply producing textual content. Replit’s, as an example, is lengthy and describes enhancing and looking code, putting in languages, establishing and querying PostgreSQL databases, executing shell instructions and extra.
Finding out others’ system prompts helped Menezes see what different vibe coders emphasised. Instruments like Loveable, V0, and Bolt “give attention to quick iteration,” he mentioned, whereas “Manus, Devin, OpenAI Codex, and Replit” assist customers create full-stack purposes however “the output remains to be uncooked code.”
Menezes noticed a chance to let non-programmers write apps, if his startup might deal with extra, comparable to safety and entry to enterprise information sources like Salesforce.
Whereas he’s not but operating the multi-billion startup of his goals, Superblocks has landed some notable firms as clients, it mentioned, together with Instacart and Paypaya World.
Menezes can also be dogfooding the product internally. His software program engineers are usually not allowed to write down inside instruments; they’ll solely construct the product. So his enterprise of us have constructed brokers for all their wants, like one which makes use of CRM information to determine leads, one which tracks assist metrics, one other that steadiness the assignments of the human gross sales engineers.
“That is mainly a manner for us to construct the instruments and never purchase the instruments,” he says.
Correction: This story was up to date to make clear that almost all not too long ago introduced spherical was an extension spherical and to replace the Collection A complete quantity raised.
