# Plugins ship prompts. Projects ship renders.

Web page: https://academy.memberpress.ai/courses/great-minds-constellation/l8/

Lesson 8 of 16 in [The Great Minds Constellation](https://academy.memberpress.ai/courses/great-minds-constellation/), 13 min.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umw5reV9oUs

This distinction is the one that gets violated most often, and when it gets violated, the architecture becomes impossible to maintain.

A plugin is a set of prompts. It lives in a repository. It is versioned. It is shared across multiple projects. When you improve the Hemingway persona file in great-authors, every project that uses great-authors gets the improvement on the next pull.

A render is a specific output — a tightened paragraph, an approved design, a shot list for a scene. It lives in the project. It is not versioned in the plugin. It does not belong to anyone except this project.

**The rule stated plainly**

Do not put renders in plugins. Do not put prompts in projects (unless they are project-specific overrides, and even then, be careful).

The Hemingway prompt lives in `.great-authors/hemingway-persona.md`. The paragraph the Hemingway session produced for your product launch lives in `projects/launch-2026/copy/hero-paragraph.md`. These are not the same file. They are not in the same repository.

**Why the separation matters**

Prompts are meant to be reused. Renders are not. If you embed a render in the plugin — if you paste last week's approved copy into the persona file "as an example" — you have contaminated the plugin with project context. The next time you use the plugin for a different project, the persona will bend toward that embedded example. The output will be subtly wrong.

The reverse failure is less common but still real. If you store prompts in the project — if you copy the persona file into the project directory and modify it for this project — you now have two versions of the persona file. When you improve the plugin, the project does not see the improvement. You are maintaining two codebases.

**What the pipeline looks like**

The plugin receives a brief (project-specific context: audience, constraints, artifact type). The plugin runs and produces a render. The render goes back to the project. The plugin is unchanged.

```
Plugin:  great-authors/hemingway-persona.md  (versioned, shared)
Brief:   projects/launch-2026/briefs/hero-copy-brief.md  (project-specific)
Render:  projects/launch-2026/copy/hero-paragraph.md  (project output)
```

Three files. Three purposes. None of them in the wrong place.

**If you get stuck**

If you are not sure whether a file belongs in the plugin or the project, ask: would I want this file to affect the output of a different project using the same plugin? If yes, it belongs in the plugin. If no, it belongs in the project.

If a render is so good that you want to use it as a model for future work, do not paste it into the persona file. Write a new section in the persona file that describes what made it work — in the craft's terms — without including the render itself.

**Cross-reference**

Lesson 3 (The five shipped plugins) showed what each plugin produces as its interface artifact. This lesson explains where that artifact goes after the session ends.

**Deliverable**

Audit your current AI working setup. For each prompt or file you maintain, classify it: plugin (would improve all projects using this plugin) or project (specific to this project). If you find renders living in plugin files, move them out. If you find prompts duplicated into projects, delete the duplicates.

**Further reading**

- ["The Hand-off: The Psychology of Trust in Agentic Workflows"](https://sethshoultes.com/blog/the-hand-off.html) — what crosses the seam between plugin and project, and what makes the hand-off feel safe to a human reader.

## Try these prompts

- Audit your current AI working setup. For each file you maintain, classify it as plugin (shared across projects) or project (specific to this project). Report what you find.
- A render so good you want to reuse it: what is the right way to learn from it without pasting it into the persona file? Write the one-paragraph addition to the persona file that captures what made it work.
- Three files: hemingway-persona.md, hero-copy-brief.md, hero-paragraph.md. Name which belongs in the plugin repo and which belongs in the project, and explain the rule that distinguishes them.

Next: [Practice - audit your plugin boundaries](https://academy.memberpress.ai/courses/great-minds-constellation/l9/)