How **SOPs** shows up in this channel In the captured material, SOPs — standard operating procedures — come from Michael Taylor's agency days: a Google Drive of hundreds of “here's how I do this” documents, each capturing one person's working method so others could repeat it. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1455] Taylor raises them as the organizational ancestor of the conversation's rule books: a junior writer extracts the difference between his draft and an expert rewrite into explicit criteria, and his next draft leaps dramatically in quality. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1455] The material's larger claim is that this habit of writing down how you do things has become prompt design. A strong, opinionated style guide is a prompt — and “prompts are kind of converging, where you'll be using the same prompt for people and for AI.” [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1638] That convergence is also the material's rebuttal to “prompt engineering is dead”: objectives are large, high-dimensional, and differ per person, so being good at detailing your objective — the same skill an SOP or rule book demands — is prompting. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1638] Taylor's own SOP archive doubles as reusable prompt material: each “here's how I do this” document encodes judgment you can hand to a person — or feed to a model — and the rule-book pattern (compare a good and a bad version, ask what differs, extract each difference into a criterion) automates deriving those documents from expert work. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1455] - SOPs = standard operating procedures: Taylor's agency kept hundreds of “here's how I do this” documents in a Google Drive. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1455] - They are the organizational version of the conversation's rule books — extracting expert differences into explicit, repeatable criteria. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1455] - A strong style guide is a prompt: prompts for people and AI are converging on the same document. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1638] - That's why “prompt engineering is dead” aged badly — detailing your objective, the skill an SOP demands, is prompting. [^01a0f15a-e590-7f2d-8b7d-8afcf1ca33f3@1638]