🚀 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 here’s 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 wasn’t. 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. It’s 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 “coding” when they weren’t.
The same illusion is happening now with AI. Prompting feels like “engineering.” You type a sentence, get a magical response, and convince yourself you’re bending intelligence. But prompting is not engineering. It’s 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 “AI-powered” in a weekend hackathon. And like HTML sites in the 1995, today’s “AI startups” are mostly wrappers with no depth, no logic, no persistence. That’s why they all feel the same.
The déjà vu is eerie. Just as early web adopters mistook HTML for programming, today’s crowd mistakes prompting for AI engineering.
3. Breaking the Surface: My Internet Journey
When I discovered PHP, everything changed. Suddenly my HTML wasn’t frozen—it 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. It’s fun, quick, accessible. But it’s brittle, stateless, and shallow. Prompting doesn’t remember yesterday, it doesn’t plan tomorrow, it doesn’t orchestrate. Just like HTML couldn’t count, prompt engineering can’t reason.
That’s why we’re flooded with “AI wrappers”: fancy UIs on top of brittle prompts. Shiny, but hollow.
5. Beyond Prompting: Where Real AI Power Lives
Here’s where the analogy tightens:
- SLM Orchestration 🧩 → Like moving from HTML to scripting languages. Small language models stitched together can simulate reasoning.
- Fine-tuning 🎠→ Like customizing your PHP functions. Domain-specific agents with memory of their own.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) 📚 → Like attaching a database to your website. Suddenly your system has memory.
- Orchestration Frameworks (like OrKa) ⚙️ → Like Django or Rails. A structure for coordination, traceability, and state.
This is the stack beneath prompting. It’s where AI becomes more than a flat page.
6. The Risk of Staying at the HTML Layer
If the community stays trapped at the “HTML layer” 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 intelligence—like real web systems—only emerges when you break through the facade.
7. Lessons From the Internet’s Growth
The web didn’t explode because of HTML. It exploded because of the deeper stack:
- HTTP, TCP/IP → protocols for distributed systems
- JavaScript, PHP, Python → logic and computation
- Databases → persistence and state
- Frameworks → 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
That’s why I’ve been building OrKa. It’s not a prompt wrapper. It’s 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 you’re playing with AI today, don’t stop at prompting. Prompts are fine as an entry point—just 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 wasn’t enough. The real power came when I learned to stitch systems, manage state, and orchestrate complexity.
AI is repeating that story. Prompting is today’s HTML: fun, shallow, democratizing—but not the endgame.
The next explosion of AI will come from those who dare to go deeper.
🧠The magic isn’t in the markup. It’s in the machinery beneath.
Written in 2025, while building OrKa—the orchestration layer for explainable, modular reasoning systems.
Top comments (3)
This analogy hit hard. I remember the same HTML “wizard” feeling in the 90s—and you’re right, prompting feels exactly like that right now. It lowers the barrier and gets people excited, but it can trap you if you don’t 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 layers—memory, reasoning, orchestration—before it becomes transformative.
Curious to hear your thoughts: do you think the industry will naturally evolve past the “prompt = product” 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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