THE CEO OF Y-COMBINATOR JUST SAID SOMETHING THAT SHOULD MAKE EVERY PROMPT ENGINEER UNCOMFORTABLE.
"When someone asks how I prompt my AI, the answer is: I don't. The skills are the prompts."
Garry Tan is not talking about better prompting.
He is talking about replacing prompting entirely.
Here is what he means and why it changes everything.
A prompt is something you write every time.
A Skill is something you write once and call forever.
The difference sounds small.
The compounding effect is enormous.
Every hour you spend rewriting the same complex prompt from scratch is an hour you could have spent building the Skill that eliminates that prompt permanently.
The builders operating at the highest level are not better at prompting.
They have stopped prompting entirely.
They have a library of Skills that handle every repeating workflow automatically.
Type one word. The Skill runs. The output appears. Same quality every time.
Here is the 7-day path Garry laid out:
Day 1: Read the Skillify 11-item checklist.
Day 2: Watch "Don't Build Agents. Build Skills Instead."
Day 3: Read "Designing, Refining, and Maintaining Agent Skills at Perplexity."
Day 4: Clone GBrain. 30 battle-tested Skills ready to deploy.
Day 5: Add GStack. 23 slash-command Skills drop right in.
Day 6: Do one workflow. Type /skillify. Watch it become permanent.
Day 7: Everything you do more than once is now a Skill.
Prompting is the manual labor of the AI era.
Skills are the automation layer.
The people who make this shift in the next 30 days will not be prompting in 2027.
They will be operating.
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Boris Cherny doesn't prompt Claude anymore.
That's not a viral paraphrase. It's his own, on-the-record statement: "I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figure out
— https://nitter.net/cyrilXBT/status/2085535666713104677#m