Prompting is one of the most valuable AI skills you can develop. But I don't think it's the most important one.
Prompting only becomes truly powerful when it's paired with another skill: asking better questions.
You can master prompt engineering and still use AI to avoid thinking or you can use a simple prompt to think more deeply than you would have on your own. Most people ask AI to produce, which is good and saves us time. But, the best AI users ask it to provoke.
Instead of asking it to write the answer, ask it to strengthen your thinking, challenge your assumptions and offer a different perspective. The first approach treats AI as an answer machine. The second treats it as a critical thinking partner.
When we only use AI to generate answers, we risk skipping the part where learning actually happens: confusion, comparison, doubt, reflection, and revision.