In the Era of AI Dominance, Does It Still Make Sense to Write Prompts to Yourself?

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 It started innocently. A complex refactoring task loomed ahead—one of those multifile, semantically delicate, potentially hair-pulling situations that could ripple across three services and two time zones worth of code ownership. Naturally, like any respectable developer in 2025, I turned to my trusty assistant: ChatGPT.

But before I could hit Enter, I found myself writing out the prompt… in excruciating detail. The context, the goal, the edge cases, the internal trade-offs, the modules involved, the caveats, the naming conventions, the rollback strategy. Twenty minutes in, I stopped.

I looked at the prompt.

I looked at my terminal.

And then I just did it myself.

The Accidental Clarity of Prompting

Here lies the strange new ritual of modern software development: articulating a problem so clearly that it becomes obvious how to solve it before the AI has a chance to reply.

Is this a failure of AI?

Absolutely not.

Is it a failure of you?

Also no. (Unless you count being competent as a character flaw.)

This is, in fact, a new mode of thinking: prompt-driven reasoning. Writing prompts forces you to slow down, disambiguate, and structure your own thoughts—much like rubber duck debugging, but now the duck might talk back.

And sometimes, you realize you don’t need the duck after all.

Rubber Ducking, Upgraded

Developers have long talked to inanimate objects. Rubber ducks. Coffee mugs. Empty chairs.

The idea is simple: explain your problem to something incapable of interrupting you, and you might just stumble onto the solution yourself. The magic isn’t in the duck; it’s in the clarity that articulation demands.

AI assistants add a twist: they can respond. So we instinctively get more formal, more precise, and more structured in our prompts. We write them like mini-specs. And that process—like writing the first draft of a README—often unlocks the path forward.

In that sense, writing a prompt to ChatGPT is sometimes less about getting an answer and more about constructing a mirror for your own thinking.

Prompting as a Thinking Framework

Here’s the paradox: the better you are at prompting, the less you need the AI.

To write a good prompt, you must:

  • Understand the core problem.

  • Disambiguate requirements.

  • Think through possible approaches.

  • Consider edge cases.

  • Imagine the desired output.

By the time you finish that process, you often already have 80% of the solution in your head.

So yes, AI is still doing work. But sometimes, the AI is you. Writing the prompt was just the IDE for your cognition.

When Prompting Doesn’t Replace You

Let’s be honest though. There are plenty of moments where AI saves your bacon:

  • You need to regex a CSV file from hell.

  • You’re writing Python and forgot how decorators work.

  • You’re generating test data with zero patience.

  • You need to explain the difference between JWT and OAuth2 to a PM in less than 60 seconds.

In these moments, prompting works like spellcheck for logic.

But the higher the complexity of the problem, the more likely it is that writing the prompt is the thinking process itself. And once that process completes, your own fingers are already moving.

Is This Still a Win for AI?

Absolutely.

AI doesn’t need to "answer" to be useful. Its presence changes how we work.

  • We externalize our thoughts.

  • We slow down to explain.

  • We model problems clearly.

It’s like journaling, but with an audience that might respond. And just like journaling, half the value is in the act of expression.

Think of it like this:

In the past, the smartest developers talked to themselves.
In the present, the smartest developers write prompts.
In the future, the smartest developers will co-pilot with AI that knows when to just listen.

So Should You Keep Writing Prompts to Yourself?

Yes. Unironically, yes.

Even if you don't need the answer, write the prompt.
Even if you know what you’re going to do, articulate it.
Even if you’re going to ignore the output, capture the question.

AI is here not just to generate solutions, but to provoke reflection.

In the era of AI dominance, writing prompts to yourself isn't a waste.
It's the new version of thinking out loud.

And if nothing else, it's comforting to know that your brain can still solve things before GPT-5 chimes in with a slightly buggy StackOverflow clone.

Final Thought

Next time you write a prompt and solve the problem before pressing enter, don’t delete it. Save it.

You’re not wasting time. You’re documenting a thought process.

And who knows—that unspoken conversation with yourself might just be the most productive pair programming session you’ll have all week.

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