Don't Learn Prompt Engineering. Here's What Matters More

06 Sep 2025 #misc

Marcus Hutchins made me read his post Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too until the end.

I have to confess I’m not an AI evangelist… nor a hater either. I’ve tried AI for coding. And after a week or two, I noticed how dependent I was becoming. Since then, I’ve used AI for low-value coding tasks, to generate small functions or find typos, not for thinking.

Marcus made a similar point about using AI for everything:

I’d make a strong argument that what you shouldn’t be doing is ‘learning’ to do everything with AI. What you should be doing is learning regular skills. Being a domain expert prompting an LLM badly is going to give you infinitely better results than a layperson with a ‘World’s Best Prompt Engineer’ mug.

When everybody is relying on AI, it’s time to go old-school habits: read books on paper, take notes by hand, and write our own summaries.

Using AI is like holding a calculator on a math exam. No matter how powerful your calculator is, if you don’t know what to compute, it’s pretty much useless. Build skills, then leverage AI.