For: admins and editors. Members can use playbooks but not create them. If you need to write one, ask an admin to change your role.
Open Playbooks in the sidebar and start a new one. Before you write anything, be sure you want a prompt rather than a skill — the short test is whether it produces something. If it governs how other things are produced, you want a skill instead.
Write the task, not the theory
The most useful prompts are the ones somebody has already made work by hand. Start from a real example that produced a good result, paste it in, and then generalise it — rather than writing an idealised version from scratch that has never been tried on anything.
Say what the output should be, who it is for, and what it must not do. “Write a reply” produces a shrug; “write a reply of at most 120 words that names a concrete next date and does not apologise twice” produces something you can send.
Mark the parts that change as variables
Anything that differs from one use to the next becomes a variable, written in double braces: {{customer_name}}, {{order_number}}, {{tone}}. Whoever uses the playbook is asked for those values.
Use fewer than you think. Every variable is a question the next person has to answer before they get anything, and a prompt with nine of them feels like a form. If a value is nearly always the same, write it into the text and let the rare exception be edited by hand.
Decide who may see it
A playbook is either open to the whole workspace, restricted to named people and groups, or Only me — you and nobody else, not even admins. The card in the list carries a badge saying which.
⚠️ Your workspace has a default for new playbooks, so the setting you get is not necessarily the one you want. Check it before you assume your colleagues can see what you just wrote.
Publish it — this is the step people forget
An unpublished playbook is a draft. You keep seeing it in the webapp, so nothing looks wrong, but the browser extension does not show drafts at all. This is by far the most common reason a playbook “does not appear” somewhere.
Drafting is genuinely useful — it lets you leave something half-written without inflicting it on the team. Just remember which state it is in.
Then use it once, on real work
The first run is the review. A playbook nobody has run is a guess, and the gap between “reads well” and “produces something usable” is where almost all the editing happens.
Two shortcuts worth knowing. You can attach workspace files as context, so a playbook can work against a document your team maintains. And the marketplace has ready-made playbooks you can add and adapt to your company rather than writing from nothing.
Updated 27 September 2026 · Article version 1