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Cover image for The AI Era: New Prompt Engineering is Just the Start: The Real Skill Developers Need is AI Product Leadership
Marika Tchavtchavadze
Marika Tchavtchavadze

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The AI Era: New Prompt Engineering is Just the Start: The Real Skill Developers Need is AI Product Leadership

🧠 Communicating With AI: The New Skill Developers Need in 2025

Talking to AI is becoming a core skill for developers — and it’s not just about writing prompts.

This week I was exploring Google AI Studio, and it made me think a lot about this new kind of skill — instructing AI clearly and guiding it to build exactly what you need.

💬 Talking to AI is Not Just Prompting

We already have a new profession called Prompt Engineering, with courses and tutorials everywhere.
It’s a fairly new concept — it started emerging around 2020 with GPT‑3 and became more formalized with ChatGPT in late 2022, so it’s been around for roughly 3–5 years.
But it’s evolving fast — and it’s not just about “writing a good prompt.”

Communicating with AI is more like managing a team: you need to understand your product, what it should do, and how to explain it clearly.
That’s when AI stops being confusing and starts helping you. Some call this the art of asking the right question

⚙️ My Experiment in Google AI Studio

Even though I can code, I wanted to see what’s trending now, so I decided to build a task scheduler and habit tracker app — with dashboards — using just prompts.

The first version appeared in minutes. But when I tried to adjust it, I noticed something important:

  • Large updates often gave results I didn’t like.
  • The trick was step-by-step commands, not everything at once.

After iterating this way, I got a version I liked — and I could share it to GitHub or deploy it with one click.

app interface

🧩 What Skills Actually Matter?

For developers using AI tools, the key skills are:

  • Coding: helps you understand the output and tweak it later if needed.
  • UI / product sense: AI can build interfaces, but you know what works best.
  • Product thinking: understanding the goal keeps your prompts effective.

The better you understand these areas, the better you can command AI.

📘 Learn From the AI-Generated Code

Even when using only prompts, AI tools often show the code behind the output.
You can study it, understand how it works, and learn from it — which helps you later build your own products more confidently.

code

🧭 The Real Skill: Giving Clear Commands

Communicating with AI is like leadership.
You give instructions, review the results, adjust, and guide again.

Good prompts are not too general and not overloaded with details.
They are clear, precise, and goal-focused.

A little knowledge about LLMs (Large Language Models) and NLP helps you understand how AI interprets your instructions.

🔗 Prompt Engineering Guide

🌟 Why This Skill Matters in 2025

AI tools are everywhere — from app builders to content creators.
Knowing how to communicate with AI is becoming a core skill for developers.

This is just how the landscape is changing: the better you get at guiding AI, the more you can prototype faster, learn faster, and create smarter products.

🌍 New Jobs, New Era

People used to say AI will take jobs.
But I see something different — AI is creating new opportunities.

From side income projects to full products, developers can leverage AI to build, learn, and experiment faster.
This era is here — and it’s up to us to adapt.

💭 Final Thought

If you’re a developer, start experimenting with AI tools.
Play with Google AI Studio, ChatGPT Canvas, or similar tools.
See what happens when you talk to your code instead of writing it line by line.

You’ll learn a lot — about AI, about clear thinking, and about guiding complex systems effectively.

What do you think?
Will “AI communication” become a must-have developer skill?
Or is it just a temporary trend?

Would love to hear your thoughts 👇

Top comments (3)

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dingowashisnamo profile image
Jeremy Strong • Edited

I wrote an article on exactly this last night. I always start off a new feature with a solid conversation, I look for a better way to implement my idea. For this, the AI is like an expert consultant, and at the end of the conversation we both know what we want to build.

dev.to/dingowashisnamo/beyond-boil...

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marikinyo profile image
Marika Tchavtchavadze

Agree, more and more people are able to build products.

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funnydark0901 profile image
Andrew Pendergast

Hi! Nice to meet you. I agree.