• writing style → prompt • coding style → prompt • color system → prompt • design system → prompt • brand guidelines → prompt • a11y requirements → p… - 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.

I generally agree that calls can be the kryptonite of productivity. However, the single most IQ-enhancing activity I do is customer calls. It's insane how much you can learn in 15 minutes of listening to a customer's vivid accounts of pain or watching them use your product in realtime

Build a product so good, your users do the marketing