Prompt Engineering Is the Self-Checkout of AI

It is not a skill to master. It is shadow work — the labor a company offloads onto you and rebrands as empowerment. And your employer is now grading you on it.

Prompt engineering is the self-checkout of AI.

The store fired the cashier, handed you the scanner, which hardly works, and called it convenience. Prompt engineering is that — for your brain. A design flaw, dressed up as a skill, sold back to you as a credential.

You open the latest AI interface. You know almost nothing about it. You don’t know its training cut-off date. You don’t know if it is good at math, or reasoning, or interpretation. You don’t know whether it makes video, audio, or slides. You don’t know if it searches the web in real time, or whether it was trained mostly on Western, US, or Chinese data.

Knowing none of that, you are asked to write the perfect prompt, one that produces the right answer for your exact situation. How can you not fail?

Say you want a business case. You assume the AI knows the right structure for your problem, in your industry, at your level of skill. How could it possibly know that? It can’t.

So, you read the output and hand it detailed corrections, assuming you even know what to correct. And when it still doesn’t work, you are sure the problem is you. You just haven’t mastered prompt engineering.

You feel like a failure for not mastering a thing that cannot really work, a thing that shifts with every model and every update.

Somehow, with AI, we have been convinced the design flaw is our burden to carry.

Imagine a date that ran like a prompt

A colleague sets you up. The date seems like a catch…on paper. Now run the prompt-engineering logic on it.

The burden is on you. Hours before the date, you prepare the exact questions and details that will steer the conversation to the outcome you want. You open with something basic, over overpriced cocktails and tapas.

Her answer is completely generic, based on the arithmetic average of everyone she has ever met, and nothing about you. But it is delivered with authority, polish, and flair, and it runs long, because talking more costs her nothing. You are paying for the date, of course. Just like your AI subscription.

You don’t love the answer, so you add detail. You get the same long, confident answer back.

Then you mention you are Indian American and ask why every answer has quietly assumed you are white.

She apologizes profusely. All her responses come from her training data, she explains, and if she had only known, she would have tailored them to you.

So, she tailors them — to whatever her mostly non-Indian-American data from the experiences of mostly non-Indian-Americans decided the Indian-American experience must be. Or is it could be or should be? You correct her again. Finally, she gets it.

Second date: Groundhog Day. She swore she had learned from the first conversation. She had not. She cannot rebuild her thinking around something you told her seventy-two hours ago. Her training cut off two years back. Alas, she only mentioned this on the second date when you asked her why she forgot all the training from the first date.

It is not her fault. And that is exactly the point. That is how AI works. The burden is entirely on you — to learn, by painstaking and expensive trial and error, that you cannot actually train the model, and were never equipped to.

Most of us are not trained researchers — and never will be

How are you supposed to run research inside an AI? Do you know what a hypothesis is? How to build one, and why? How to bend it around the politics of your own organization? Do you know what good research looks like, or a good answer, or the actual steps to solve a problem — and produce something your colleagues and your board will accept?

AI expects you to know all of this, and to guide it. Then it forgets. Every day, it forgets.

It offers you more room to write better prompts. That is like handing my friend’s three-year-old more sheets of paper to explain what she wants from life. She only knows how to draw a cat, a dog, and a pig. The extra paper does not help. It just gives her more room to be lost.

We believe AI means we no longer must learn anything. AI will do it for us. Great marketing but a sad reality. You have not just learn something the old way, you have to master it to check the AI outputs and then instruct AI on how to give you exactly what you want.

Economists have a name for this: shadow work

There is a term for what is being done to you. Shadow work, the unpaid labor a company quietly transfers to the customer, then rebrands as empowerment. Prompt engineering is shadow work for the mind. And now your employer grades you on it.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere.

Want a refund on a bogus charge? Ask too often and your bank quietly removes the online button. Now you must call, wait in a long line and explain to someone in a call center why you need a refund on an overbilling. And then, just for fun they will ask you to submit documentation.

On a recent flight, an airline suggested passengers help each other lift luggage into the overhead bins. Because, why not?

Want extra ketchup? There is a charge for that.

Want your wealth managed? A wealth management firm will take 2% of it every year and, in return, offer you almost nothing. Literally no help.

Want to send a return? Find your own box, print your own label, drive to the store.

Want to cancel a subscription? Good luck! The world’s longest queue and at least four supervisors “reviewing your file.”

And the overpricing that funds all of it stopped being an American sport a while ago. Kris and our core team have been travelling the world for investment opportunities lately, and I can report that robbing the middle class has graduated to a worldwide craze. It is America’s greatest export. Here’s looking at you, Berlin. And Spain. And too many other places to name.

Then, on top of every bit of it, your manager tells you to make time to master prompt engineering — or you are out.

Life is already too hard

You already have to master being a great friend, or you will have none.

A great spouse, or you will have none.

A great son or daughter, or you will have no family.

A great colleague, or no colleagues.

A great employee, or no job.

A great neighbor, or no neighbors who like you. And, again, no friends.

A great parent, or no kids who respect the effort you made.

You get zero training for any of the above. Zero, since we decided home economics and civics were a drain on the budget.

And there is more for you to do.

You get to turn a skill into a salary. Well, you must or you will be homeless and unemployed. Learn leadership. Learn teamwork. Negotiate rent, buy a car, plan a retirement you were never taught to plan. Date, in whatever dating has become.

Everyone is handed more than they can possibly hold.

Prompt engineering is just the newest thing on the pile.

Michael AI does not make you do the prompting

Here is the part that matters for anyone who runs anything. This is not a skill gap. It is a cost transfer, and the cost is the scarcest thing you own: your judgment, spent operating the tool instead of making the decision.

Kris and I have spent decades solving complex business problems and implementing them. That is our very public track record and history documented through thousands of videos, audio, PDF and power point files. In every executive coaching session, the first thing we do is correct the problem the client is solving, then walk them down a disciplined path. That, not clever prompting, is where the value is.

So we built Michael AI to carry that burden, not hand it to you. It works by knowing who you are (your strengths, your limits) and taking you down the path to the hard answer, with no syllabus of prompt tricks to memorize first.

We tell everyone the same thing, and we mean it: go try the others first. Try Claude, try Gemini, try Perplexity. Then try Michael AI. Only then will you see the difference.

Our lack of prompt engineering is the whole point. Less tax on your time. Better output.

The measure of good AI is not how well you can talk to it. It is how little you have to.

P.S. The next time someone sells you a prompt-engineering course, ask one question: if the tool needs a manual that thick to give a straight answer, who exactly is the tool serving? Then go get your time back.

Related reading

• AI Strategy Is Not a Strategy — why AI must serve the corporate strategy, not the other way round.
• A Perfect Corporate Sleight of Hand Becomes Tougher With AI — advice that is finally measured against banked value.