PixelRaider

There’s a cottage industry now around “prompt engineering.” Courses, certifications, job titles. People charging money to teach you the right way to talk to a language model.

Most of it is overcomplicating something simple.

The skill that matters isn’t knowing magic words or secret techniques. It’s the same skill that’s always mattered in any project involving other people (or now, machines) doing work for you: knowing what you actually want, and being able to articulate it clearly enough that someone else can build it.

I’ve sat through hundreds of hours of “analysis” sessions. Want to know how many of those hours changed what we actually did?

A number that rounds to zero.

This sounds cynical. It’s not meant to be. It’s an observation about how time gets spent when smart people gather around a conference table - or more likely now, a Zoom call - to discuss “the data.”

The Pattern

Here’s how it usually goes.

Here’s a scenario that keeps VPS operators up at night: your hosting provider suspends your account. Maybe they detected “suspicious activity” that was actually legitimate traffic. Maybe they had a billing dispute. Maybe they just decided they didn’t want your business anymore.

Doesn’t matter why. What matters is whether you can rebuild somewhere else in an afternoon or whether you’re scrambling through support tickets hoping someone will give you access to your data.

The term “vibe coding” is a bit silly, I’ll admit. But it describes something absurdly powerful that’s made my professional life meaningfully better.

I work in digital marketing. I’m technical enough to read code, troubleshoot issues, and hack together solutions when needed. But writing production-quality applications from scratch? That was always just outside my reach - close enough to be frustrating, far enough to feel like a legitimate barrier.

Then something shifted.