Superblocks CEO: Learn how to discover a unicorn concept by learning AI system prompts
Brad Menezes, CEO of enterprise vibe coding startup Superblocks, believes the subsequent crop of billion-dollar startup concepts are hiding in virtually plain sight: the system prompts utilized by current 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 tips on how to generate their application-level AI merchandise. They’re, in Menezes view, like a grasp class in immediate engineering.
“Each single firm has a very completely different system immediate for a similar [foundational] mannequin,” he instructed 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. Clients can ask many AI instruments to share theirs. However they aren’t all the time publicly obtainable.
In order a part of his personal startup’s new product announcement of an enterprise coding AI agent named Clark, Superblocks supplied to share a file of 19 system prompts from a number of the hottest AI coding merchandise like Windsurf, Manus, Cursor, Lovable and Bolt.
Menezes’s tweet went viral, considered by virtually 2 million together with huge 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, bringing its whole to $60 million for its vibe coding instruments geared to non-developers at enterprises.
So we requested Menezes to stroll us via tips on how to 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 stated, which is the infrastructure a startup builds across the calls to the LLM. That half contains directions it attaches to a consumer’s immediate, and actions taken when returning the response, resembling checking for accuracy.
Roles, context and instruments
He stated there are three elements of system prompts to review: position prompting, contextual prompting, and gear use.
The very first thing to note is that, whereas system prompts are written in pure language, they’re exceptionally particular. “You principally have to talk as when you would to a human co-worker,” Menezes stated. “And the directions should be excellent.”
Position prompting helps the LLMs be constant, giving each objective and persona. For example, Devin’s begins with, “You might be 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 adjustments till they’re appropriate.”
Contextual prompting offers the fashions the context to think about earlier than appearing. It ought to present guardrails that may, as an illustration, scale back prices and guarantee readability on duties.
Cursor’s instructs, “Solely name instruments when wanted, and by no means point out software names to the consumer — simply describe what you’re doing. … don’t present code except requested. … Learn related file content material earlier than enhancing and repair clear errors, however don’t guess or loop fixes greater than 3 times.”
Software use permits agentic duties as a result of it instructs the fashions tips on how to transcend simply producing textual content. Replit’s, as an illustration, is lengthy and describes enhancing and looking out code, putting in languages, organising 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 “concentrate on quick iteration,” he stated, whereas “Manus, Devin, OpenAI Codex, and Replit” assist customers create full-stack functions however “the output continues to be uncooked code.”
Menezes noticed a possibility to let non-programmers write apps, if his startup may deal with extra, resembling safety and entry to enterprise information sources like Salesforce.
Whereas he’s not but working the multi-billion startup of his desires, Superblock has landed some notable firms as prospects, it stated, together with Instacart and Paypaya World.
Menezes can be dogfooding the product internally. His software program engineers are usually not allowed to jot down inner instruments; they’ll solely construct the product. So his enterprise people have constructed brokers for all their wants, like one which makes use of CRM information to establish leads, one which tracks assist metrics, one other that stability the assignments of the human gross sales engineers.
“That is principally a means for us to construct the instruments and never purchase the instruments,” he sais.