Prompt Engineering: A Fundamental Life Skill

When people hear the phrase “prompt engineering” the instinct is often to imagine someone typing clever lines into ChatGPT or another AI tool, as if the skill lies in finding a magic formula of words.

- DR SANKU BOSE

It is easy to mistake it for a typing trick or a kind of digital wordplay. But that view is shallow. At its heart, prompt engineering is not about typing at all—it is about thinking. It is a discipline of clarity, structure, creativity, and intentionality. It is about how we frame problems, how we define context, and how we guide intelligence—whether human or artificial—towards meaningful outcomes.

In many ways, this is no different from the history of coding. Writing computer programmes was never truly about memorizing syntax or hammering out lines of text at speed. The best coders were never the fastest typists, but the best thinkers. They designed logic, imagined systems, and anticipated outcomes. The same is true of prompt engineering today. The value is not in knowing secret phrases, but in designing thought processes that make intelligence useful. The keyboard is only the surface. What matters is the thinking beneath.