Prompt Engineering Is Dead
Earlier this year, I wrote about 10 ChatGPT productivity patterns I was using at work. They were reusable ways of thinking about AI, not scripts to copy-paste. Since then, an entire industry has sprung up doing the exact opposite. There are now courses, certifications, $499 prompt libraries, and entire business models built around selling the "perfect" collection of templates. It's the hottest grift in tech right now, and I think most of it is garbage.
Nobody Saved Their AltaVista Queries
Remember the early days of search engines? Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos - back when finding what you wanted online actually took skill. You had to phrase your searches just the right way, use boolean operators, sometimes try 5 different variations before you found what you were looking for. Then Google showed up and you could just... ask. Nobody saved those queries. Nobody sold "10 Power Search Templates for AltaVista". And if they did, those templates became worthless the moment Google changed how search worked.
That's exactly what's happening with prompts. What was a good prompt for GPT-3 is bloated noise for GPT-4. What GPT-3.5 needed explicit instruction for, GPT-4 handles with a plain English request. The models are getting smarter faster than anyone can update their prompt libraries. Saving prompts today is like bookmarking your best AltaVista searches in 2002 - it feels productive, but the shelf life of a prompt is about six months before the next model makes it obsolete.
Even image generation shows this. With earlier versions of DALL-E, you had to describe every detail of your image - lighting, composition, style, angle — or the output was garbage. DALL-E 3 just launched and it auto-rewrites your half-baked description into a detailed prompt for you. The model got smarter, and the "skill" of crafting the perfect image prompt became obsolete overnight.
3 Bad Prompts Beat 1 Perfect Prompt
There's a quality vs. quantity thing that prompt sellers conveniently skip over. They want you to believe that the key to AI mastery is crafting the one perfect prompt that will unlock everything. A well-structured prompt is a legitimate shortcut: it gives the model a pattern to follow, and crafting it is real sweat equity where you learn the quirks of the current model through trial and error. But three quick, rough prompts will still get you further than one polished masterpiece. The first attempt reveals what you actually need, the second refines it, and the third might nail it or spawn three more follow-ups as you fill in the nuance.
The people who are actually productive with AI don't follow scripts. They iterate, push back, and course-correct on the fly. It's more like brainstorming with a smart colleague than filling out a template.
The Best Template Is Your Own
Here's the thing about prompt sellers - they have a perverse incentive structure. "Just ask clearly and iterate" doesn't sell courses. They need you to believe that AI is complicated, that there are secret incantations, that without their template pack you'll be left behind. The real skill isn't in the prompt. It's in understanding the tool. When does it work well? When does it fall apart? What are its quirks? What is AI genuinely better at than you? What are you better at than AI?
If you apply the 80/20 principle here: study your own weaknesses, study your own strengths, and use AI to cover the 80% that doesn't require your expertise. That mental model still works in a year. Template collections won't.
AI Rewards Storytellers, Not Template Followers
Think of AI as a transformation matrix for your thoughts. Say you just got off a call with a vendor who wasted three months of your time. You're furious, so you dump a raw, unfiltered rant into the chat: everything you want to say but can't. Then you tell it "make this professional." The frustration, the specific grievances, the context: it's all still there, but now it reads like it came from someone who bills $400 an hour. Same rant, different transformation: "summarize this for my boss" gives you a three-sentence status update, and "turn this into a vendor evaluation" gives you a structured assessment with recommendations.
That works for any content, not just rants. Write a technical deep-dive once, then tell AI to rewrite it for marketing (strip the jargon, lead with business impact), for an engineering README (keep the detail, add setup instructions), or for a quarterly summary (just the metrics and bullet points). The core idea stays the same. The framing changes based on who's reading it. That's not a prompt template, but being able to clarify your ideas through context, examples and analogies.
So What Should You Do Instead?
Stop saving prompts, look for patterns instead. Notice what works and what doesn't. Build your own intuition for when AI is being helpful vs. when it's confidently bullshitting you (which, as I've written before, it absolutely will do). The real competitive advantage isn't in having the best prompt collection. It's in being the person who doesn't need one.