Most People Treat AI Fluency Like a Ladder. The Best Teams Use a Trampoline Instead
From simple prompts to vibe coding, there are five common ways people work with new tools.
EXPERT OPINION BY PAM DIDNER, B2B MARKETING CONSULTANT AND AI STRATEGIST
I coach B2B teams on AI adoption, and I hear the same line every week, said like a confession: “We’re still just typing questions into ChatGPT or Claude.” Five minutes later, someone on the same team mentions they built a custom AI agent last month.
Both are true. Neither means what the person thinks it means.
After two years of watching this across client teams, I’ve mapped AI usage into five stages: prompts, mega-prompts, skill files, plug-ins, and vibe coding. Line them up, and it looks like a ladder. In practice, it behaves like a trampoline—people bounce between stages based on the task, not their skill level.
The person who vibe-codes an app Monday still
The person who vibe-codes an app Monday still fires off a one-line prompt Tuesday to check a fact. That’s not backsliding. That’s picking the right tool.
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The mistake I see leaders make is grading people against a line that doesn’t exist. Someone spends weeks building a reusable prompt library, then types a plain question under deadline pressure, and their manager reads it as backsliding.
It isn’t. Fluency isn’t a certificate—it’s a set of tools you reach for based on the job.
Stage 1: Prompts
A prompt is one question, typed once, answered once. This is where almost everyone starts, and where most people should stay for quick summaries, fact-checks, and one-off rewrites. People stall here because nobody tells them what’s next: the third time you retype the same request, start thinking about merging tasks into one prompt.
Source: www.inc.com
