All writing
·4 min·
PromptingHiringEngineering

Prompting is the new core skill

Not a side trick. Not a hack. The thing the next generation of engineers will be evaluated on.

Every senior engineer I respect spent the last year quietly getting better at prompting. Not 'learning prompt tricks.' Building a real intuition for how to talk to models so the output is useful on the first pass.

The marketing message says 'AI writes the code now.' The actual experience is: a precise, well-scoped prompt produces working code in one shot. A vague one produces ten rounds of corrections and a worse result than writing it yourself.

Prompting is the new core skill the way typing was once a core skill. Invisible if you have it. Painfully visible if you don't.

The next generation of engineers will be evaluated on three things: can they read code well, can they write code well, and can they prompt well. The third one is the one most hiring loops still ignore — and the one that separates 'AI-curious' from 'AI-native' candidates within five minutes of a working session.

Also published on, or originally from:

LinkedIn

LET'S TALK

Hiring? Or stuck mid-build?

Open to senior in-house roles with conversational AI / voice agent / AI-native DXP teams. Available for select Toptal engagements. I reply within 24 hours with something concrete — not a calendar link to a discovery deck.

→ Hiring conversations: tell me about the role and the stack

→ Project work: tell me the bottleneck, not the requirements doc

→ Either way, I'll come back with a take, not a pitch

LinkedIn DM

The fastest way to reach me. I'm already there every day — posts, comments, replies. Send a message and I'll come back within 24 hours.

/in/apsolut

GitHub

Pinned tools, side projects, the README that explains the vibe. CIA lands here when it's open-sourced.

/apsolut

Not ready to reach out?

Read what I've been writing about agents, model routing, and prompting. The fastest way to figure out if our wavelengths match.

Prefer email? Drop a line on LinkedIn first — I'll share the right address depending on whether the conversation is hiring, freelance, or something else.