The dust will not settle

I remember when technology went obsolete in about two years flat. You put in a shiny new 3.5-inch floppy drive, and suddenly you need a CD-RW burner. You finally learn some jQuery, and there you go: React killed it.

But none of that holds a candle to what is going on now. If you are starting to build anything AI-related, be ready to abandon the project halfway through because the paradigm shifted underneath you.

Prompt engineering? A year ago some people genuinely believed it would become a profession.

RAG? I have written about it already: it used to be a discipline of its own, and then agents and long context all but finished it off.

Fine-tuning and orchestration frameworks died more quietly: while you were still collecting the dataset, a new model already knew all of it out of the box, and the LLM learned to plan by itself, just hand it a TODO tool.

Agents? That is where we are for now. But it looks suspiciously like everything that came before.

It is very tempting to skip all of this and wait for the dust to settle. Yet in nearly every other interview I run into a reminder of why that does not work: a "senior" developer, 10+ years of experience, knows how to set up Kubernetes, has no idea what a bitmask is.

Knowing how to use the tool is not enough. You have to understand how it is built, or you end up as that senior with Kubernetes and no bitmask.