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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.

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