Will prompting remain the primary way humans interact with AI models, or will other methods (e.g., learning from examples) supersede it?

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025 · hedged

Prompting won't change dramatically, but AI systems will increasingly learn from examples rather than instructions.

Humans learn support work by shadowing and seeing examples, so AI is likely to move the same way; for now prompting remains the best method.

Scope: 'hard to say'; prompting is still the best way today

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Zach Lloyd · Oct 17, 2025

Building with AI will always require some expression of human intent to the computer, even as the total context available to the model comes from more and more sources beyond a person typing a request

For anything creative and non-deterministic, the model isn't going to read your mind — a builder has to express what needs to be done

Scope: applies to creative, non-deterministic work; 'prompt' used as shorthand for any expression of intent, not literally a written paragraph

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Ethan Mollick · Jul 31, 2024 · speculative

There is only a narrow current window in which prompting style and being up to date with these systems matters; the assistant-on-your-phone step may be skipped straight past it

Humans are exquisitely designed to minimize effort, so if the systems genuinely save time people will adopt them without learning craft — as shown by 70%+ ChatGPT adoption in universities versus a few percent elsewhere

Scope: phrased as 'I wonder if'

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Harry Stebbings · Sep 19, 2025

Prompting is the most outdated way of working with AI models, and users will not be choosing which model they run on within a year.

Scope: framed as his personal view

40:21 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025 · hedged

Prompting will still exist in five years but will evolve, with hyper-personalization replacing much of today's detailed prompting as systems learn how you think

Prompting is just supplying context about your goals; like a great employee who knows how you work, a personalized system needs only a short instruction, whereas a generic model like ChatGPT would produce something different from what you had in mind

29:17 Hyper personalization replaces detailed prompting while prompting persists

Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024

Two interfaces will survive in AI products: one where the user asks the AI for an outcome, and one where the user trains the AI

AI is not God — it makes mistakes and has no superhuman knowledge of your proprietary data, so it has to be trained, and making training easy for users is the key design problem

14:44 Two durable interfaces persist asking for outcomes and training the ai

Zach Lloyd · Oct 17, 2025

The big productivity shift underway is that every coding task now starts with a prompt, even if not every task can be finished with one

At Warp every coding task starts with a prompt and they try to get all the way to completion with prompting, though some tasks are too hard regardless of tool

12:49 Prompting is now the universal starting point for coding tasks

Zach Lloyd · Oct 17, 2025

Autocomplete is not the future of coding; the future is developing by prompt

29:58 Prompting not autocomplete is the future of coding