The Best AI Skill to Develop in 2026?

“With all this AI, what skills should kids be learning to set themselves up for success?”

A common question many of us get.

My answers are always a bit surprising… but consistently, “get excellent at describing how things work” makes it near the top.

Quick story

We watched Home 🏠 Alone as a family last night…which we’ve probably done 100+ times before.

To change things up (and attempt to keep everyone’s phones in the pockets), we played “movie bingo” with different words/situations from the movie on the cards.

How did it turn out?: Awesome!

We had so much fun! Everyone was engaged and interacting the whole movie… there were even requests to do it again tonight!

So, I did what any AI dad would have done on a Black Friday morning…

I created a web site.

https://movienight.bingo/

This neat little site makes it easy to generate and print bingo cards, with some popular movies already loaded. You can also generate custom bingo cards for anything you want, just bring your own list.

The Cool Part

Here’s some fun facts about the process:

• The site was built in ~5 minutes!
• It was EXACTLY what I had imagined, with 100% of the functionality I asked for
• It was just ONE iteration (“ask”) to the LLM
• Approximately 15 minutes was spent registering the domain and CI/CD (automated) source repository and hosting.

What’s The Point?

This experience resembles the new paradigm of work.

Want something? Make it.

But to get this kind of quality/turnaround experience, there’s a lot of prep that went in.

1. We played the game first - had first-hand experience what worked. And, what didn’t.
2. Then, I invested nearly 2 hours writing the user prompt for how the site should work.

Why It Matters

Proportionally, it wasn’t about having decades of experience in tech, the ability to code, or which LLM I used.

It was about the thought put into describing how the application should function, removing ambiguity, and understanding user behaviors to anticipate flow or problems.

Conclusion

While I’m extremely happy with the results… the outcome isn’t about the website itself.

It’s about the learnings .

When it comes to AI, we’re all still learning… but one thing I’m learning more and more is how to critically think about how applications need to behave and what user expectations will be.

I think this is THE SKILL to learn and it pays dividend over any technical skill. And, it can result in some fun little experiments like this site and some great bonding time with family!