AI Is Changing Everything. Here's How I'm Keeping Up
The moment that made me pause
Six months ago, I watched a junior developer ship a feature in one afternoon what used to take our team two weeks. The difference? An AI agent running in the background. That moment forced me to ask: Am I becoming obsolete?
And this was not an isolated event, lots of people have already experienced the impact of AI in their fields in the last year. Even principal engineers at Google have been thrown for a loop the way coding models have been able to solve some tough problems in record time.
I’ve spent 8 years mastering my craft. The idea that an AI could match my output in minutes isn’t just interesting — it’s unsettling.
AI is everywhere — and it’s not slowing down
I work in the tech sector and have been a witness to all the major shifts that have happened in the last couple of years post arrival of LLMs and AI Agents. The way I feel today about all these changes, I guess the same feelings people would have gotten back in the 1900s when industrial revolution started where manual work got shifted into machine work.
The amount of AI-fication that I have seen in recent years across the segments is incredible, be it kids using ChatGPT for homework or the fashion industry is adopting generative AI to create photorealistic, high-quality, on-model photography or programmers running multiple agents in background to complete all those JIRA tickets in a single sprint which would have taken months if not years.
Earlier it felt like a bubble which might burst anytime and we will be back to normal but now I don’t feel it’s a bubble and at least certain things if not all have been altered by AI and they will remain that way. Note, I am not talking about the stock market bubble here, I am no expert in commenting on that.
Today, in tech field we are in a similar state where manual coding is slowly getting overpowered by agentic coding. I have mixed feelings about it and haven’t yet made my mind on which camp I want to join - those who are pro-AI and dream about achieving AGI or anti-AI where people are against the excess use of AI with concerns on AI harming humanity once it achieves AGI.
In either case, one needs to be well aware about the advancements happening in the AI field, no matter which camp you belong to. And for that I have decided that in 2026, I will try to get myself well versed with AI developments happening in my field and along the way I will document my learnings here.
How I’m navigating this in 2026
I doubt anyone has the liberty to ignore the impact of AI in their field of work and would advice everyone to have a similar road-map for upskilling yourself in using AI.
My high-level road-map is as below,
- Read on how we got here in AI in terms of developments
- Start getting hands on with AI tools(Move ahead of basic ChatGPT prompts)
- Finding practical use-cases of AI in my day-to-day work
- Contributing to AI development
The steps mentioned above are quite high level and as I progress through this, things might change. But this should give you an idea on how I will be navigating the AI space for now.
To start with the first step of understanding the AI space, I am currently reading Genius Makers by Cade Metz which should give me a brief idea about the overall journey these AI agents have made so far. Will try to publish the book review as well on my website.
Come along for the ride
I am not a philosophical person but some questions do come to my mind like if everything from coding, writing scripts, creating pictures/drawings will be done by AI then what will remain for us? Current LLMs have proved that they can beat humans in a lot of fields if not all or at least beat bottom 70-80% of the people across different fields.
What is it that makes humans so special on Earth? And how can majority of the people reinvent themselves to not just be a cog in the AI machine? Don’t have an answer to all these questions but hope that I will have an answer to all these questions once we are well within the journey of understanding AI and its actual purpose.
Hope my journey helps someone out there to understand AI slightly better than what they already know.
Every week, I’ll share what I’m learning about AI — the tools, the trends, and the questions that keep me up at night. If you’re navigating this shift too, subscribe so we can figure it out together. And drop a comment: What’s your biggest question about AI right now?