Customizing AI Prompts

Every AI button in Time Garden runs a prompt — a piece of instruction text the model receives along with your journal data. The default prompts are tuned to extract specific, concrete details and write in a warm "you" voice. But you can change them.

This is where Time Garden goes from "an AI journaling system" to "your AI journaling system".

Where The Prompts Live

1. Open Obsidian Settings
2. Click Time Garden Plugin in the left sidebar
3. Find the AI Prompts section

You'll see a tree of editable text areas, organized by:

• Operation (rating, alias, summary, wheel-of-life, Q&A, year review)
• Layer (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly)

Each one is a regular text area. Edit it. Save. Done — your next AI button click uses the new prompt.

What's Actually Sent

When you click, say, AI Weekly Summary, the model receives roughly:

[YOUR PROMPT — e.g., "Write a 5-sentence summary of this week..."]

[CONTEXT — e.g., the week's daily summaries / chunks]

[USER QUESTION (only for Q&A)]

The model returns text. Time Garden cleans it (removing thinking tags, etc.) and writes it back into your note.

Default Style Rules

The default prompts are explicitly opinionated:

• Use "you" — the AI talks to you, not about you in third person
• Use specific events, not generic words — "the run on Tuesday" not "some exercise"
• No filler / no platitudes — the AI is told to skip lines like "this was a meaningful week"
• Aim for specific word counts — e.g., 5 sentences for weekly summaries, 3 phrases for aliases

Most users keep these. But you can break any of them.

Examples Of Useful Customization

Make summaries more concise

Default summaries can run 5+ sentences. If you want one-paragraph summaries, append:

"Limit your response to a single paragraph of no more than 80 words."

Make aliases shorter

If phi4-mini keeps generating 6-word daily aliases and you want 3-word ones:

"Generate exactly 3 words. Combine activities into a single noun phrase."

Make the AI ask better questions in Q&A

Add to your Q&A prompts:

"If the user's question is vague, briefly suggest 2 more specific questions before answering."

Inject your personal style

Add to your weekly summary prompt:

"Write in the voice of a slightly poetic friend. Use sentence fragments where they fit. Avoid corporate language entirely."

Three Optional Toggles

In the AI Prompts section there are three checkboxes:

By default these are off (the AI works from summaries alone). Turning them on usually makes outputs more grounded and specific — at the cost of longer prompts and slower generation.

How To Iterate Without Breaking Things

1. Don't edit all prompts at once. Pick one operation, change one thing.
2. Run the AI button, read the output, decide if it's better.
3. If yes: keep it. If no: tweak more or revert.
4. Move on to the next prompt.

Resetting Prompts

If you've customized your way into a corner, the plugin settings have a Reset to Defaults button on the AI Prompts section. Use it freely — it only resets prompts, not models or other settings.

A Note On Quality

For chronic generic-output issues even on a good model, see Dealing with useless AI answers.

Up Next

• Choosing Your AI Models — picking which model gets the prompts
• Chunking Settings Explained — how much context the prompts see
• Dealing with useless AI answers — when the prompt isn't the problem