The New Literacy: Not Coding, but Orchestration

The Skill I Trust More Than Prompting

I have nothing against good prompts. A precise prompt can save time. But I do not think prompt cleverness is the literacy that matters most.

The more durable skill is orchestration: framing the work, breaking it into parts, choosing the right tool, setting boundaries, checking outputs, preserving context, and deciding when a result is good enough to move forward. It is less glamorous than screenshots of perfect one-shot prompts. It is also much closer to how serious work actually happens.

The builder is no longer just typing instructions into a model. The builder is designing a small operating system around the work.

Prompting Comes After Thinking

When an AI output is bad, the prompt is not always the first thing I blame.

Often the real problem happened earlier. The task was fuzzy. The constraints were missing. The success criteria were vague. The context was pasted without hierarchy. The model was asked to solve a disagreement that the human had not resolved.

I have done this myself. When I asked agents to help with the insurance triage benchmark before the schema was stable, the outputs looked productive and created cleanup. Once the spec was clearer, the same tools became useful. The model did not suddenly get smarter. The work got framed.

My first orchestration rule is simple: do not outsource confusion and then complain when it returns in fluent English.