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Two of the top minds building today’s most advanced AI coding agents have quietly stopped doing one thing:
Manually prompting their agents.
Instead, they now spend their time designing the loops that prompt the agents for them.
**Boris Cherny, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, **openly says he no longer prompts Claude himself. He writes the systems that prompt it.
**Peter Steinberger, **creator of the fast-growing open-source agent OpenClaw, has been urging developers to make the same shift:
Stop being the person typing prompts. Start becoming the person who designs the system that does the prompting.
Both are still shipping code at high speed with AI every day.
In a matter of weeks, this idea went from a tweet to industry conversation. A Google Cloud AI director gave it a name. Bloomberg put real dollar figures on what happens when it’s done poorly. And Andrew Ng dedicated an entire newsletter to it.
The message is clear: The game is changing.
If you’ve spent the past year mastering prompt engineering, your skill isn’t obsolete but…