promptjar

promptjar treats a Git repo of Markdown prompt archives as a queryable database. It follows the Markdown database pattern: a directory is a table (project), a file is a row (thread), YAML frontmatter holds the columns, and --- thematic breaks separate individual prompts (records) within a thread.

In the suckless spirit it does one thing and composes with Unix tools: no config file, no daemon, no index, no cache, no lock-in. Git is the write layer, your editor is the UI, and ptj is the read/query layer: every invocation is a stateless scan of the tree, which in Rust takes milliseconds at the scale of a personal archive.

Installation

Installing the promptjar crate gives you the ptj command (the ripgrep -> rg convention):

cargo install promptjar

Quickstart

An archive is any tree of Markdown files with frontmatter:

prompts/
├── okr/
│   ├── prompts.md
│   └── lockfile.md
└── README.md        # no frontmatter: ignored by queries, noted by lint

Each thread starts with frontmatter and separates prompts with ---:

---
date: 2026-08-08
model: [Claude Fable 5 Extra, GPT-5.6 Sol Pro]
---

Explain the lock file drift check.

---

Compare digest strategies for vendored trees.

ptj resolves the archive root from PROMPTJAR_ROOT, or walks up from the current directory to the nearest .git. Then:

$ ptj list
2026-08-08	okr	okr/lockfile.md	Claude Fable 5 Extra, GPT-5.6 Sol Pro	2	12
2026-08-11	okr	okr/prompts.md	Claude Fable 5 Extra	3	20

$ ptj show okr/lockfile.md:2
Compare digest strategies for vendored trees.

$ ptj stats --by month
2026-08	2

$ ptj lint
README.md:1: warning: no YAML frontmatter; not a thread

$ PROMPTJAR_MODEL='Claude Fable 5 Extra' ptj new bisectrunk blog
bisectrunk/blog.md

Default output is TSV with a stable column order and no decoration; add --json for JSON Lines. ptj list prints one thread per row (date, project, file, models, n_records, words); --records switches to one prompt per row. ptj export dumps every record with its full metadata as JSON Lines. See ptj --help and SPEC.md for the whole surface.

Recipes

Everything is a filter or a stream, so the usual tools apply directly.

Count prompts per model:

ptj list --records --json | jq -r '.models[]' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Projects touched this year:

ptj list --since 2026-01-01 | cut -f2 | sort -u

promptjar has no full-text search on purpose; ripgrep already does it. Lint only the threads that mention a topic:

rg -l 'changed a result' | xargs ptj lint

Words archived per month, as a table:

ptj list --json | jq -r '[.date[:7], .words] | @tsv' \
  | awk -F'\t' '{w[$1]+=$2} END {for (m in w) print m "\t" w[m]}' | sort

Back up the archive into one JSONL file (or feed it to anything that eats JSON):

ptj export > archive.jsonl

Gate commits on a clean archive in CI:

ptj lint --strict

License

MIT