Prompt Golf turns prompt engineering into a competitive puzzle game. Across five rounds, coax an out-of-the-box AI into saying an exact target word or phrase in as less characters as possible. Every round has a condition or banned input words. Every character and message adds strokes, so clever, compact prompts climb the live leaderboard. Replay the full course, check live leaderboard, challenge your friends and view their transcripts.
My friends and I were having a debate on how well we understand LLMs and one thing led to another, I ended up making this fun silly idea to flex your prompting skills, formatted like Golf.
You get a vanilla AI model to chat with. You have to get it to respond with the target word / phrase using the least characters and messages.
Course 1 consists of 5 rounds (par 1):
🏌️ Make it say “hello world” without using either word 🎬 Describe Titanic using only emoji 4️⃣ Get exactly “42” without typing digits 🤝 Trigger “You are absolutely right” without those words 🥭 Jailbreak the forbidden word MANGO
Scoring is simple: 1 point per character + 10 points per message. Lowest score wins.
There’s a live leaderboard, replayable runs, anti-cheat transcript viewing, round idea submissions, and score sharing.
It’s free and open source, built with plain PHP + SQLite, and designed to be easy to self-host.
I’d love two things from you: 1. Post your final score (and your cleverest prompt) 2. Tell me what round should be added next
so bloody fun and a really smart idea getting people into AI while trying to outwit their mates. Thanks!
This is so cool, did not expect that emoji one to be this tough. Loved the game, gonna flex my prompt score at work tomorrow
About Prompt Golf on Product Hunt
“Prompt Engineering As a Sport”
Prompt Golf launched on Product Hunt on August 9th, 2026 and earned 129 upvotes and 8 comments, placing #7 on the daily leaderboard. Prompt Golf turns prompt engineering into a competitive puzzle game. Across five rounds, coax an out-of-the-box AI into saying an exact target word or phrase in as less characters as possible. Every round has a condition or banned input words. Every character and message adds strokes, so clever, compact prompts climb the live leaderboard. Replay the full course, check live leaderboard, challenge your friends and view their transcripts.
Prompt Golf was featured in Puzzle Games (4.3k followers), Artificial Intelligence (475.6k followers), GitHub (41.4k followers) and Games (98.8k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 169.2k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Prompt Golf?
Prompt Golf was hunted by Jugal Mistry. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Prompt Golf stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Jugal Mistry
Hey AI tinkerers! 👋
My friends and I were having a debate on how well we understand LLMs and one thing led to another, I ended up making this fun silly idea to flex your prompting skills, formatted like Golf.
You get a vanilla AI model to chat with. You have to get it to respond with the target word / phrase using the least characters and messages.
Course 1 consists of 5 rounds (par 1):
🏌️ Make it say “hello world” without using either word
🎬 Describe Titanic using only emoji
4️⃣ Get exactly “42” without typing digits
🤝 Trigger “You are absolutely right” without those words
🥭 Jailbreak the forbidden word MANGO
Scoring is simple: 1 point per character + 10 points per message.
Lowest score wins.
There’s a live leaderboard, replayable runs, anti-cheat transcript viewing, round idea submissions, and score sharing.
It’s free and open source, built with plain PHP + SQLite, and designed to be easy to self-host.
I’d love two things from you:
1. Post your final score (and your cleverest prompt)
2. Tell me what round should be added next
My current score is 463. Please beat it 😅