You should not learn AI

— but something more useful

Marketing sucks. And marketing targeting algorithms suck more.

Every day I am flooded with posts, videos, ads that try to teach me about AI. Any idiot with a keyboard or a phone tries to get rich teaching AI prompting or secret methods to get AI work for you. They write a dumb system prompt and feel like they uncovered the holy grail of marketing, so they think they can charge you for that or get your money to teach you the secret of System Prompt. There is no secret: the system prompt is there, everyone can use it.

Then there are those selling agents. They use lyrical metaphors like “Agent Army”, vivid images like “they work instead of you while you sleep”, and present agents as the real response to those problems that you can’t solve with a simple prompt. The real problem is that you shouldn’t use simple prompts at all, but you don’t need to pay someone to create agents or to teach you how to create them.

This is because agents are automatically built by the harness when it needs them, or you can ask the harness to build one if you think it’s useful. You just have to write in plain English (or any language you want, indeed). You don’t need courses or paying someone to teach anything to you: if you can write, you have all the technical skills you need.

So it’s really so simple? I ask, and AI does? Yes, it is. But no, it isn’t.

Because you have to know what to ask. You have to master the domain you are working in. You can’t simply ask “make me a modern and game-changing CRM” and hope for a complete working solution that will make you rich. To have a good product you have to know a ton of things: how to design a codebase, how to implement a software, how software works, which features you want to include and, perhaps more importantly, which ones you want to exclude. You should have a really clear idea of what you want and why.

AI (at least for the moment) can’t figure it out for you: it can try, but it will produce average products, because it’s trained to reproduce what it has seen: and what it saw is not brilliant, it’s a load of mediocre work. If you want something more, you have to think something new.
The problem is not doing anymore, it’s thinking: today anybody can code crap. But once you code crap, it’s totally useless.

Don’t be a victim of those bandits who know nothing but to use system prompts and try to get your money: building is easy for everybody, building good things is not. But those bandits won’t teach you anything to fix the problem.

The real problem is that if you think AI will enable you to do things you don’t know, you are delusional. AI will enable you to learn almost everything, and only then you will be able to build something real. Don’t search for prompt templates, or magical agents. Build a real solid knowledge on the topic you are interested in, then take the command and simply give AI a clear path to follow.