AI prompting is exposing some Gen Z workers' weak typing skills

The argument that prompting rewards typing rests on one claim in the Business Insider piece. AI is only as good as the prompt it is given, and rambling voice prompts can be insufficiently clear and precise ^[5]. Gerasimov describes the effect as a matter of willingness: a fast typist writes the longer, fuller prompt because it costs him little. "You're going to be a lot more comfortable actually giving your full thoughts and ideas if you know that, hey, doing this is only going to take a minute," he said ^[7].

The counterargument comes from the same cohort. Andrusiak said one of her friends put it this way: "Well, you don't really have to type the whole page. You can just give it short sentences. It's not really that tiring." ^[14] For quick tasks the friend is probably right. Andrusiak's objection is about what the short version hands over. "But then I feel like it's outsourcing too much of cognitive power to a technology," she said ^[13].

The board-deck version of onboarding assumes that people raised on screens arrive fluent at keyboards. That assumption is incomplete. Francazi says his newer students did not grow up around physical computers, are much less familiar with keyboards than earlier typists, and often arrive typing rapidly with two fingers, so he starts them on the basics ^[9]. Andrusiak got to college typing that way, loudly enough that a professor kept pausing his lecture ^[2]. "It was the first moment I realized that I may not be the best at this," she said ^[3].

The evidence is thin and should be weighed that way. It is one feature built on a handful of named people, and the article does not measure output or time lost at work. Tarun Krishnamurthi, a sophomore at San Diego State University, said slow typing could worsen workers' output and that "typing could be a big bottleneck" ^[12]. He is 18 and still in college. The spread of skill inside one generation is wide all the same. Gerasimov never took a typing class and got fast through video game chats ^[6], while Krishnamurthi began practicing in middle school for fun ^[15].

For a manager, the trade-off is training hours now against accommodation later. Training is cheap to try. Francazi says students of all ages become entranced by a three-minute typing test ^[10]. Accepting dictation looks free at first, but it commits the team to quiet space ^[1] and to extra review of prompts that come out loose ^[5]. A team that trains nobody this quarter will have chosen that path by next quarter without ever deciding it.