Jason M. Lemkin says mastering AI agents beats prompt engineering. His team built an AI VP of Finance in hours, connecting it to Bill, QuickBooks, and Salesforce to automate billing. The real skill gap: most teams haven't built enough agents to understand their strengths and failure points.
Didn't we say this about prompt engineers when this show started? Yeah. How many prompt engineers have you hired on the 20VC team? You know, the fact that we were able to build a director, we call 'em a VP, a director of finance remotely in China that is better than any human on the team in a single-digit number of hours is kind of this point, right? And Rory asked, "Why isn't everybody doing it?" And my response is they can, they just don't have the mindset to do it today. They just don't have enough of, they just haven't spent a year vibe coding So they don't know what's possible, and they don't know— they haven't scaled a certain amount of, of, of human learning to have the comfort. You know, it's like doing your first venture investment. It's a little scary, right? Um, you know, but when you've been doing it for a while, the next one doesn't seem so complicated, even if you know how to put the pieces together. So it's kind of like that. So I do think it's true. I think this is the number one skill, uh, is being a master of agents. What— and, but, but I think what that means is going to get redefined each year, right? So So again, when we started the show, people were still hiring prompt engineers because prompts were complicated to craft. They were really hard to— if you didn't— when we started the show, whatever, 60 weeks ago, if you didn't craft the right prompt, the software that came out was, was unusable. Okay? Today I can go in, I can vibe code something. I can say, build me an AI VP of finance, connect it to Bill, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and our other app, reuse what we have, and just automate all of our billing process. That can be my prompt. I think most people can write that prompt, can't they? So you don't need a prompt engineer, but you do need a master of agents to understand what you're gonna get outta that, where the limitations are, where it's gonna break, what it's not gonna see, where it's gonna get lazy. The, the, our AI VP of finance last night admitted it didn't fully read a contract. We asked it why. It's like, I don't have a good answer for you. Wow. I like that. Okay. So, so being a master of agent is not throwing your monitor out the window when you hear that or calling IT. It's like, okay, I get what happened. Okay.
