We Love Copy Paste

Me: Being AI user at various layers and being developer, i keep wondering the prompts and prompts shared. As I understand AI responds well to understanding and is great follower. If we simply take others prompts of all types, what are we trying to solve? Or I am being too critical

AI: You're not being too critical — you're asking the right question.

The core tension you're identifying is real: most prompt-sharing culture treats prompts as transferable artifacts, like code snippets. But a prompt is really a compressed expression of someone's understanding of a problem. Without that understanding, you're just cargo-culting.

There are a few layers to this:

What copying prompts actually gives you — syntax patterns, structural ideas, a sense of what's possible. That's legitimate. It's like reading someone else's code to learn idioms, not to ship their solution.

What it doesn't give you — the reasoning behind why that prompt works for that person's context, model version, use case, and iteration history.

The real issue — the prompt-sharing economy implicitly sells the idea that the prompt is the insight. It's not. The insight is knowing what you need the model to do, where it's likely to fail, and what constraints matter. The prompt is just the last mile of that thinking.

The people who get the most out of AI aren't the ones with the best prompt libraries. They're the ones who understand their problem deeply enough to have a conversation with the model — iterating, pushing back, adjusting. Which is basically what you do.

So no, you're not being too critical. You're just past the phase where prompts-as-recipes is useful, and into the phase where understanding-as-leverage is what matters.