Prompt engineering is for losers. Want to beat AI? Get Back to Fundamentals

Latest update: 2/10/2025

People are investing billions (billions!) in AI; meanwhile all I want is a printer that just works

Look, I’m getting old, I don’t have time for nonsense. So do me a favor, kid, and pipe down for a sec with your prompt engineering, LLM nonsense.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s exciting tech for sure. I use it a lot, and there’s definitely some fun to be had with it.

But it won’t replace the smartest among us. If you’re not careful, though, it will replace you.

Here’s how it will do it: it will lure you into a false sense of security, and make you believe that all you need to do is write a clever sentence, and voilà! You have a full-fledge application. And you might be right: in time, that could well happen.

BUT… trust me, soon there will come a time when you just won’t have the words and ideas you need to communicate with the machine; it will be like being stuck on a bad date with a boring individual. You colleague Bob, on the other hand, will still thrive and continue bulding amazing things with AI (and without it), and he’ll get the promotion. What’s Bob’s secret? You guessed it: Bob is a basic tech b***ch. Bob focused on old, boring things, while you where chasing the shiniest new thing. Here’s why that makes Bob smart.

Hey Kid, Ever heard of the Lindy Effect?

In this post, Shane Parrish teaches us how to choose the best books books to read (here’s how to read them more effectively). One of the principles he uses is the Lindy Effect. He explains:

“For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy. So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live. […]”

“So your ROI on reading and understanding a concept from 500 years ago is highly likely to be exponentially greater in the long run than one presented only 5 years ago.[…]”

“What I’m trying to get at is that the more fundamental or closer to the source that you move, the better the ROI in the long run.”

The things that never change will save you. That’s the difference between being smart and being wise.

To Win, Think in Terms of First Principles

Prompt engineering is for losers

The better you understand the fundamental building blocks in your domain, the easier it is to work with AI:

  • You can ask it the right questions,
  • You can actually understand and evalute the answers (and tell the machine if if give you garbage response)
  • You can apply the response in the right context
  • You can explain all of this to another human being.

Prompt engineering is for losers. Again, again, again, focus on the fundamentals:

  • Writing proper sentences God, kid, you’ve no idea how underrated reading, writing and speaking well is. It’s always been a great way to succeed in life, but now? Now it’s a superpower. Underrated as hell, I tell you. Accessible to most people, for free or almost free (go hug your local librarian). And yet…so, so rare. Pick up a book. I beg you. I dare you. Also try a foreign language for good measure. Duolingo, baby!
  • Understanding complex problems The world is a complicated, ambiguous, weird place. Those who conquer it are able to understand it first. If you can break down a complex problem in small pieces, you’re halfway to solving it. If you can state the problem to an AI clearly, you’re 80% done. But writing that statement is not always straightforward. It’s a skill. Get good at it. Also highly underrated.
  • Maths, maths, maths Get good at maths. Even if an AI can do maths, you’ll be 300% more effective if you can do maths with it. And if you can understand the underlying algorithms that make the AI tick in the first place, all the better.

See how the Lindy effect works here? Prompt engineering is a short-term skill that will last you maybe 3 years. Writing well and solving complex problems? That will last you a lifetime.

This is the difference between the people who build AI tools and those who merely use them. These people are uber-smart; you can bet you bottom dollar, they know maths. They know algorithms. They can code without an AI assistant. In their sleep. With their hands tied behind their back.
And with the help of an AI, they become nuclear-level smart, and filthy rich. Meanwhile, here you are, generating dumb pictures and fluff content that’s already everywhere online.

Choose the fundamentals. You’ll thank me later.