[TZubiri]

>I think the core challenge here is that being able to (in "development") quickly change the prompt or other parameters and re-run the system to see how it changes is really valuable for making a tight iteration loop

Sure, do that, but also you are deploying changes to your system, you can't just move the changed module out of the repo and pretend it's not a change.

>It's annoying/difficult in practice if this is strictly in code. I don't think a database is necessarily the way to go, but it's just a common pattern I see. And I really strongly believe this is more of a need for a "development time override" than the primary way to deploy to production, to be clear.

Or a file, if you just put the prompt in a file (instead of overengineering a dspy thing, just use a file with text), then the file is now part of the source code, if you take it out of the repo, it doesn't stop being source code, it's now unversioned source code.