Yesterday a small Chrome extension popped up in r/PromptEngineering, and it does something most prompt tools skip. It stops and asks you a question before touching your draft. The creator, a Redditor going by u/Mysterious_Local6819, got tired of prompt optimizers that quietly guess at missing details. They hand back a “better” prompt that might not mean what you actually meant.
So they built Prompt Generator to fix that one specific annoyance. Here’s what’s new: you type your rough prompt, hit “Generate Prompt,” and the extension scans it for decisions that could actually swing the answer. Think audience, format, tone, scope. The stuff that changes everything downstream. If nothing important is missing, it just writes the final version and gets out of your way.
Now the twist, and it’s the whole reason this tool is worth a look. When something IS ambiguous, the extension doesn’t guess for you. It surfaces the missing decisions directly and waits for you to pick. Only after you’ve made those calls does it write the final prompt. It combines your original draft with the choices you actually made, not the ones a model assumed on your behalf.
That’s a real inversion of how most “prompt improver” tools work. They rewrite first and bury their assumptions inside a nicer sentence. This one refuses to hide anything.
The feature list is short on purpose, and that’s worth noting too. No fancy dashboard, no account required to poke around, no chat history slurped in behind the scenes. It’s a single button that either writes your prompt straight away or hands you a short list of decisions first. Compare that to the average “AI prompt optimizer” browser add-on, most of which run your text through a model once and call it done. This one adds exactly one extra step, and only when that step actually earns its place.
Here’s the mini-workflow if you want to try it yourself:
- ✍️ Write your rough prompt like you normally would. Don’t overthink it.
- ⚡ Click “Generate Prompt” and let the extension scan for gaps.
- 🔍 If it flags decisions, read them and pick what you actually mean. Don’t default-click through.
- ✅ Review the final prompt. It’s still fully editable and fully undoable.
Nothing sends automatically at any point. You stay in control the whole way through.
A few design choices from the original post explain how this contributor thinks about trust. The extension only reads what you type into it. It doesn’t scan your full chat history. And it never silently fills a gap with a default that “looks right” but isn’t. That last part is doing the real work. One commenter, u/Future_AGI, put it well in the replies: the clarification step isn’t the clever part. Refusing to guess is.
The community reaction is where this gets genuinely useful for anyone building something similar. u/ChaseAtSidekick flagged the real failure mode to watch: getting asked the same low-value question every time kills trust fast. Their own rule of thumb is a cap of three questions, and only if the answer would materially change the output. u/OriginalHospital raised a fair counterpoint too. Sometimes you’re brainstorming, and you genuinely want to leave something unspecified. Being forced to commit to an audience or format too early can narrow your own thinking before you’re ready. That’s a real tension between precision and flexibility, and it’s not obviously solved yet.
Pro tip one: if you test this yourself, watch whether the questions actually change your answer. If you’d write the same final prompt no matter what you picked, that’s friction with zero payoff. That’s exactly what makes people quit a tool after a few tries.
Pro tip two: keep your rough draft rough on purpose. The whole workflow depends on the tool finding the gaps for you. Writing a “perfect” first draft defeats the point.
Pro tip three: since the output stays editable, treat the generated prompt as a strong first draft, not gospel. Nudge the wording, tighten it, then send it yourself.
What actually stands out here isn’t the extension. It’s the principle underneath it. Most AI tooling right now optimizes for looking finished fast. This one optimizes for you actually knowing what you asked for. That’s a small design decision with a much bigger implication for how “AI assistant” tools should behave whenever details actually matter.
One caveat worth flagging before you install anything: the creator is still figuring out exactly when to ask and when to stay quiet. That’s the open question they posted the whole thread to answer. Too many clarifying questions and people bail. Too few and you’re back to the original problem of silent guessing. Where that line sits is still being worked out in the comments as we speak.
If you spend real time in prompt engineering, or you build tools in this space, this is worth ten minutes of poking around. 🎯 Grab it from the Chrome Web Store and run it against a prompt you know is genuinely ambiguous. See whether the clarification step earns its keep, or just gets in your way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: When does clarifying details actually help vs. just slow you down?
Clarifications matter most when you have a rough idea but haven’t locked in key decisions. If you’re iterating quickly, skip them. The real test: you should never see the same low-value question twice if it didn’t matter the first time. If clarifications feel repetitive, that’s feedback the tool should adapt to.
Q: Can I see how my choice affects the output before I commit?
Yes, the extension shows a one-line preview of how each clarification changes the result. This cuts friction significantly because you can judge the consequence without designing the whole prompt from scratch.
Q: What if I want to brainstorm without locking in decisions?
You can leave details unspecified or skip the clarification step entirely. Since it never auto-sends and includes undo, you have room to experiment. Try multiple runs with different clarifications to explore directions, or discard if it doesn’t feel right.
Q: Why not just let it fill in assumptions automatically?
Most prompt tools quietly fill gaps with defaults that narrow your answer in unintended ways. This one surfaces assumptions so you can see, reject, or adjust them. You stay in control, it’s not redesigning your prompt, just making impactful decisions visible.
Q: How does it know which questions are actually worth asking?
Only questions that materially change the output. A practical target: three questions max per session, each one meaningfully shifting the result. If a clarification doesn’t move the needle, it shouldn’t repeat.
I built a prompt generator that asks what’s missing before rewriting your prompt
by u/Mysterious_Local6819 in PromptEngineering