Prompting is the new literacy - Guillermo Rauch

Will we hire engineers in the future?

Prompting is thinking. The sharper your thoughts, the better the prompts, the better the outputs. Engineering and design are headed into a world where most of the output is produced by prompting, if not all.

The way we interview engineers has already been trending in this direction. At Vercel, we don’t care if you memorized every API and module. When we look at your coding, we assess the quality of your thinking and collaboration. It’s more so an evaluation of your “thinking tokens” or reasoning trace. In fact, the more you expose it, walking through how you backtrack, pivot, adjust, consult, the better signal we get.

My prediction is that the demand for great thinkers will remain unabated. It’s unclear if we’ll call them engineers or if it’ll matter, because these people will have a lot of full stack impact on the whole business, as they’ll have access to prompt their way to any successful outcome.

Happiness and productivity are two sides of the same coin. We’re at our best when our work creates value for others and we get rewarded. This is why socialism, communism, and any kind of unearned welfare inevitably lead to misery and the end of civilization.

The confidence that I have in my taste, and the ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for vibe coding