đ In the late 90s I felt like a wizard. I had discovered HTML.
I could open Notepad, type a few lines, save as .html, and suddenly my words were online. The rush was insane: I am publishing on the internet. It was raw empowerment. Anyone with a bit of patience and curiosity could do it.
But hereâs the catch: very quickly I hit the wall. Static pages. No memory. No logic. No persistence. Just flat markup. It looked like programming, it even felt like programming, but it wasnât. It was a surface layer. And staying at that layer was a trap.
Today, AI is going through the exact same phase. Prompting is the new HTML.
1. The HTML Trap
HTML is seductive. Itâs declarative, simple, and instantly rewarding. Back then, people genuinely thought HTML was programming. But in truth, it was a publishing layer, markup for structure and style, not computation. It democratized the web, yes, but it also misled an entire generation into believing they were âcodingâ when they werenât.
The same illusion is happening now with AI. Prompting feels like âengineering.â You type a sentence, get a magical response, and convince yourself youâre bending intelligence. But prompting is not engineering. Itâs the surface paint of AI.
2. AI Today = DĂ©jĂ Vu
Prompting today is what HTML was in 1999: a cheap thrill, shallow but viral.
Like HTML, prompting democratizes access. Anyone can build something âAI-poweredâ in a weekend hackathon. And like HTML sites in the 1995, todayâs âAI startupsâ are mostly wrappers with no depth, no logic, no persistence. Thatâs why they all feel the same.
The dĂ©jĂ vu is eerie. Just as early web adopters mistook HTML for programming, todayâs crowd mistakes prompting for AI engineering.
3. Breaking the Surface: My Internet Journey
When I discovered PHP, everything changed. Suddenly my HTML wasnât frozenâit responded. Ugly spaghetti code, sure, but it was alive. Then JavaScript: true interactivity. Then Django: models, state, full systems. It was like moving from finger, painting to architecture.
The power was never in HTML itself. It was in the stack beneath it, databases, servers, protocols, scripting languages. HTML was just the facade.
This exact shift is now happening in AI.
4. Prompting as HTML of AI
Prompting is the entry layer. Itâs fun, quick, accessible. But itâs brittle, stateless, and shallow. Prompting doesnât remember yesterday, it doesnât plan tomorrow, it doesnât orchestrate. Just like HTML couldnât count, prompt engineering canât reason.
Thatâs why weâre flooded with âAI wrappersâ: fancy UIs on top of brittle prompts. Shiny, but hollow.
5. Beyond Prompting: Where Real AI Power Lives
Hereâs where the analogy tightens:
- SLM Orchestration 𧩠â Like moving from HTML to scripting languages. Small language models stitched together can simulate reasoning.
- Fine-tuning đ â Like customizing your PHP functions. Domain-specific agents with memory of their own.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) đ â Like attaching a database to your website. Suddenly your system has memory.
- Orchestration Frameworks (like OrKa) âïž â Like Django or Rails. A structure for coordination, traceability, and state.
This is the stack beneath prompting. Itâs where AI becomes more than a flat page.
6. The Risk of Staying at the HTML Layer
If the community stays trapped at the âHTML layerâ of prompting, AI will stagnate into a sea of shallow wrappers. No defensibility. No depth. No reasoning. Just flat pages pretending to be applications.
Real intelligenceâlike real web systemsâonly emerges when you break through the facade.
7. Lessons From the Internetâs Growth
The web didnât explode because of HTML. It exploded because of the deeper stack:
- HTTP, TCP/IP â protocols for distributed systems
- JavaScript, PHP, Python â logic and computation
- Databases â persistence and state
- Frameworks â orchestration of all the above
AI will follow the same path. Its future is in the deep stack: models, memory, orchestration, reasoning, distributed cognition.
8. OrKa and the Deep Stack
Thatâs why Iâve been building OrKa. Itâs not a prompt wrapper. Itâs an orchestration layer for cognition.
Where prompting stops, OrKa begins:
- Forks, joins, routers: parallel reasoning and decision trees
- Memory layers: short-term, long-term, decaying
- Service nodes: RAG, embedding, memory writers
- Trace logs: deterministic, replayable cognition as it show in Orka Society Of Mind exp 01, Orka Society Of Mind exp 02 or ,Orka Maternal instinct
This is the equivalent of Django for AI reasoning: modular, structured, transparent.
9. Call to Action
If youâre playing with AI today, donât stop at prompting. Prompts are fine as an entry pointâjust like HTML was. But real power lies deeper. Build with small models. Attach memory. Orchestrate agents. Use frameworks like OrKa to make reasoning explainable.
Be the dev who learns JS, PHP and Django when everyone else is stuck in HTML.
10. Closing Reflection
Looking back, HTML was the gateway drug. It got me in, but it wasnât enough. The real power came when I learned to stitch systems, manage state, and orchestrate complexity.
AI is repeating that story. Prompting is todayâs HTML: fun, shallow, democratizingâbut not the endgame.
The next explosion of AI will come from those who dare to go deeper.
đ§ The magic isnât in the markup. Itâs in the machinery beneath.
Written in 2025, while building OrKaâthe orchestration layer for explainable, modular reasoning systems.
Top comments (3)
This analogy hit hard. I remember the same HTML âwizardâ feeling in the 90sâand youâre right, prompting feels exactly like that right now. It lowers the barrier and gets people excited, but it can trap you if you donât push deeper.
What resonates most for me is the point about orchestration frameworks. Just as the web only took off once we moved beyond static markup, AI will need structured layersâmemory, reasoning, orchestrationâbefore it becomes transformative.
Curious to hear your thoughts: do you think the industry will naturally evolve past the âprompt = productâ phase, or will we be stuck in HTML-like wrappers for longer than we should?
Thanks! My opinion is that we are in the middle of a tsunami wave... When the water will settle down we will see the damages. Then promoting will be take carefully and people will start to go deeper to find real solutions..
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