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.

Fine-tuning on your domain? While you were still collecting the dataset, a new model shipped that already knows all of it out of the box.

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.

Agent orchestrators? Entire frameworks were built on that paradigm. And now the LLM can 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.

It is not enough to know how to use the tool. You have to understand how it is built.