Everyone’s collecting prompts like Pokémon cards.

“50 ChatGPT prompts that will 10x your productivity.” “The ultimate prompt template for [thing].” “Copy this exact prompt and watch the magic happen.”

I’ve helped dozens of people and several companies adopt AI into their workflows. The ones who actually get good? They learned to write prompts and understand fundamentals before jumping to higher-order solutions.

The Problem Isn’t Collecting Prompts

Having a library of prompts is fine. Great, even. The best tradespeople have toolboxes full of techniques they’ve refined over years.

The problem is how most people build their collection. They grab prompts from some library, paste them in, and pray for magic. Doesn’t work? Find another prompt. Rinse and repeat.

You know what this is? Copy-pasting jQuery from StackOverflow and calling yourself an engineer.

A PM could do that.

The difference between a PM pasting code and an engineer writing it? The engineer understands why it works. They can debug it. Adapt it. Improve it.

You don’t become fluent by using someone else’s prompts. You become fluent by writing your own. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.

Think Google-Fu

Remember that friend who had “Google-Fu”? The one who could find anything online while you were still staring at a results page full of garbage?

They didn’t have magic keywords. They had intuition. They understood how search worked well enough to know what to type, how to refine, when to try a different angle. Thousands of searches over years built that.

That’s AI fluency. Not knowing the perfect prompt. Developing the instinct to communicate with these systems. When to be specific. When to be vague. When to push back. When to start over.

You can’t download Google-Fu from a tips article. You can’t download AI fluency from a prompt library.

It’s a Muscle

AI fluency is a muscle. You build it through reps.

Write prompts. Run them. See what works. Understand why. Try variations. Fail. Adjust. Try again.

No shortcut exists. The people who are great at AI got there by prompting. A lot. They didn’t read about prompts. They wrote them. Intuition through repetition.

Put in the reps and something shifts. You build your own prompt library. Prompts you wrote. Prompts you understand. Prompts you can adapt on the fly.

That’s the difference between cargo-culting and fluency. Borrowing someone else’s tools and hoping they fit versus building your own toolbox, piece by piece.

Higher-Order Tools Won’t Teach You

Use agentic workflows. Use AI coding assistants. Use whatever helps you ship faster. I’m not saying avoid them.

But don’t expect them to teach you fundamentals.

Remember jQuery? A generation of developers learned jQuery without learning JavaScript. They made things happen on webpages. Animations. AJAX calls. DOM manipulation. Worked great. Until it didn’t.

React showed up. JavaScript developers adapted. jQuery-only developers? Stuck. They’d built on abstraction without understanding what was underneath. When the abstraction changed, they had nothing.

Same thing is happening with AI right now. You can use Claude Code or Cursor or whatever agentic tool and ship real work. Fine. Good, even. But if you never learn how prompting actually works, you’re the jQuery developer who never learned JavaScript.

Here’s the mental model: You’re either building skills or you’re using them.

Building skills? Go slow. Write prompts manually. See what works. Understand why. Develop intuition.

Using skills? Go fast. Leverage the tools. Trust the abstractions. Ship.

Both modes matter. The mistake is thinking you can skip the first one. You can’t use skills you never built. Full stop.

Hone your fundamentals now. Every new tool, every new model, every new paradigm. You’ll adapt because you understand the layer underneath.

Skills Are Portable. Tools Are Not.

The AI landscape shifts fast. Entire communities migrate from one tool to another in a week. Everyone was on Codex. Now it’s Claude Code. Next month? Something else.

All-in on a specific tool? You’re constantly re-tooling. New interfaces. New quirks. Starting over.

Understand prompting fundamentals? You’re good anywhere. New tool, same skills. New model, same intuition. New interface, same principles underneath.

This is what separates a 10x engineer from someone who’s just fast in their favorite IDE. The 10x engineer sits down in front of any editor, any language, any codebase, and bangs out code. Not IDE-dependent. They understand programming.

AI fluency works the same way. Everything is just a prompt underneath. The tools become interchangeable. You’re not learning Claude Code or Cursor or whatever comes next. You’re learning to communicate with AI. The tool is just the interface.

Skills compound. Tools deprecate.

Build the skills. The tools will take care of themselves.