For decades, we optimised for the wrong things. Memorisation. Credentials. Which university name you could drop. How many facts you could recall in an interview. The education system was built around filling heads with information that would be useful later.
Then AI happened and suddenly the information is just there. You do not need to remember it. You need to know how to get it.
The new skill is prompting. Not in the narrow sense of writing clever queries to ChatGPT. In the broader sense of knowing what to ask, how to ask it, and what to do with the answer. The people who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who can extract value from these tools. Credentials are becoming less relevant by the day.
Can you prompt, bro? That is the question now.
Your degree means less every year
I am not saying education is worthless. Learning how to think, how to research, how to work through hard problems, these skills matter. But the specific knowledge you gained, the facts you memorised, the formulas you learned, that stuff depreciates faster than ever.
A law graduate used to have an advantage because they spent years learning case law and legal principles. Now an AI can retrieve relevant cases instantly. The advantage is not gone, understanding context still matters, but it is dramatically reduced.
A finance graduate used to have value because they could build models and analyse data. Now an AI can do quantitative analysis that would have taken days in minutes. The value shifts from doing the analysis to knowing what analysis to request.
Every field has a version of this. The stored knowledge that justified expensive degrees is becoming commodity. What you know matters less than what you can figure out with tools.
The great equaliser
There is a democratising aspect to this that I find genuinely exciting. A kid in a rural town with internet access now has access to capabilities that used to require elite education and expensive software. The playing field is not level, nothing ever is, but it is more level than before.
You do not need to have attended Stanford to build sophisticated applications. You need to understand the problem, break it into pieces, and prompt your way to a solution. Someone with raw intelligence and curiosity can accomplish things that previously required credentials and connections.
This is threatening to people who invested heavily in traditional paths. If your value proposition was the name on your degree, that value is eroding. If your value proposition was memorised knowledge, that value is nearly gone.
The people who adapt will reposition. They will learn to use AI as leverage. They will focus on the skills that AI cannot replace. The people who do not adapt will keep insisting their credentials matter while the world moves on without them.
Prompting is a real skill
I see people dismiss prompting as a fad. It is not a real skill, they say. Anyone can type into a chatbot.
Anyone can type. Not everyone can get useful results. There is a massive gap between casual ChatGPT use and expert prompt engineering. The experts know how to structure requests, how to iterate on results, how to break complex problems into promptable pieces, how to verify outputs, how to chain multiple interactions into coherent workflows.
This is a skill. It can be learned. It can be developed. It creates real value. The people who are good at it are dramatically more productive than people who are not.
And unlike traditional credentials, prompting skill is demonstrable. You cannot fake it in an interview. Either you can get useful outputs from AI or you cannot. Either you know how to leverage these tools or you do not. The proof is in the results.
What schools should be teaching
The education system has not caught up. Schools still emphasise memorisation. Tests still reward recall. The curriculum was designed for an era when information was scarce and knowing things was valuable.
Information is not scarce anymore. Knowing things is less valuable than knowing how to find things and use things. Schools should be teaching research skills, critical thinking, prompt construction, output verification, synthesis across sources, and productive collaboration with AI tools.
Some schools are starting to adapt. Most are not. The gap between AI-native graduates and traditional graduates is going to widen. Employers will notice.
If I were advising a student today, I would say: yes, get the degree if you need the credential, but spend at least as much time learning to use AI effectively. The degree gets you in the door. The AI skills are what will make you valuable once you are inside.
The new flex
Nobody is going to be impressed that you memorised a textbook. Nobody cares that you can recite facts without looking them up. That is a party trick at best.
The new flex is output. What can you build? What can you produce? What problems can you solve? How fast can you go from idea to result?
AI is a multiplier. It multiplies what you can do, but only if you know how to use it. The person who can prompt effectively ships in days what used to take weeks. That is impressive. That is valuable. That is what people will respect.
Can you prompt, bro? Can you take a vague requirement and turn it into a detailed specification that AI can execute? Can you iterate on AI output to get something actually useful? Can you spot when AI is wrong and correct it? Can you combine AI capabilities with your own judgment to produce something better than either could alone?
These are the skills that matter now. Not where you went to school. Not what you have memorised. What you can do with the tools available.
The era of credentials is ending. The era of capability is beginning. Learn to prompt or get left behind.