Keeping up with AI is almost a second job

It's almost impossible to keep up with the latest in tech, especially the AI side of it. Unless you have someone on your team whose actual job is to scan the news and tell you what matters during work hours, you're doing it on your own time. That means evenings, weekends, or whatever slivers of attention you have left after the day's work is done.

There's probably a much larger group of people than we think who do their job well, close the laptop at the end of the day, and go enjoy their life. They cook dinner, see their family, work on hobbies, go for a walk. That's a normal way to live. It's also the way most people have lived for most of working history.

The pace has changed

Five years ago, a new framework or library might dominate conversation for a few months. Now there's a new model, a new tool, a new workflow every week. We can all feel it. Even people who spend significant time keeping up admit they're behind on something.

What I don't know is how this is going to land on the job market for the people who tune all of it out. Not because ignoring AI makes you bad at your job. In most roles, you can still ship good work without it. The pressure won't come from quality. It'll come from output.

Once enough people in a company are using these tools, management starts expecting the throughput that comes with them. The baseline shifts. People who haven't adopted anything end up looking slow by comparison, even if their work is solid.

Why I lean into automation

I've always liked automating tedious and repetitive work. If something has to be done the same way twice, I'd rather spend a bit more time the first round and then never think about it again. AI tools have made that easier than it's ever been. Things that used to require a custom script or a half-day of yak shaving can now be a short prompt away.

The payoff isn't doing more work. It's protecting the time I have for the parts of the job that actually need thought. Architecture decisions, debugging weird issues, writing something that someone will read in six months and need to understand. That work doesn't compress as cleanly, and it's where the value is.

A reasonable middle

You don't have to be plugged into every release to stay current. Reading one or two solid sources a week is enough to know what's real and what's noise. Picking one or two tools and using them seriously beats trying to evaluate everything. The goal isn't to keep up with the field. It's to stay close enough that you're not surprised by it.

And if you'd rather close the laptop at 5 and go live your life, that's fair too. Just be aware of what the rest of the room is doing.