you choose your primers differently depending on what you want to do
you usually use a oligomer around 20 nucleotides long because of it reduces the likelihood that the primer will bind to a random sequence and because you need to maintain certain temperatures for proper annealing and elongation during PCR. If your sequence is too short or too AT rich, then the primer will more likely be able to be denatured from your DNA during annealing and this causes a loss of specificity for your DNA sequence.