This is the most important observation. I'm getting so many workshop invitations from my corporate colleagues about AI and agents. What most people don't get that these clever patterns they "invented" will be obsolete next week. This nice company blog about agents - one which got viral recently - will be obsolete next month. It's hard to swallow for my colleagues that in these age - like when you studied gang of four or a software architecture pattern book that you have learned a common language - no, these days the half-life of a pattern for AI is about a week. Even when you ask 10 professionals what an agent actually is - you will get 10 different answers yet they assume that how they use it is the common understanding.
This is also why it's perfectly fine to wait out this AI hype and see what sticks afterward. It probably won't cost too much time to catch up, because at that point everyone who knows what they're doing only learned that a month or two ago anyway.
> It probably won't cost too much time to catch up
That's a risky bet. It is more likely that the user interface of AI will evolve. Some things will stick, some will not. Three years from now, many things that are clunky now will be replaced by more intuitive things. But some things that already work now will still be in place. People who have been heavy users of AI between now and then will definitely have a leg start on those who will just start then.
In general, I'm not too afraid of UI - those are usually very learnable in a short amount of time. It's the underlying concepts and abstractions that take more time to pick up, but right now, a lot of them seem to be based on observations (or just general "feels") of the behaviour of particular models, of which new ones appear every year.
Counterpoint to these two posts: a journeyman used to have to make his own tools. He could easily have bought them, or his master could have made them. Making your own tools gives you vastly greater skills when using the tools. So I know how fast AI agents and model APIs are evolving, but I’m writing them anyway. Every break in my career has been someone telling me it’s impossible and then me doing it anyway. If you use an agent framework, you really have no idea how artificially constrained you. You’re so constrained, and yet you are oblivious to it.
On the “wasting three months” remark (GP), if it’s a key value proposition, just do it. Don’t wait. If it’s not a key value prop, then don’t do it at all. Often times what I’ve built has been better tailored to our product than what AWS built.
I agree with this point. It is about being a craftsman esp. the point about if it is part of your KVP or not.
In addition to this, if you do have the skills of doing it, then you can either patent it or open source it.
This will allow you to be part of the ecosystem giving you a much greater heft in the community. At the very least, if you've done something at least put it out there as an alternative to what's being pushed by AWS (or whoever). You never know...
You can make your own hand plane, and you will be a better woodworker for it. Still in a few months your competition will be using a electric planes and routers
the hand plane vs. the electric plane may not be the right metaphor. It will be more like one hand plane vs. another.
Just because it is a "great big" company pushing it with all their might ($s), doesn't mean it is the best solution out there. There's a lot of people who would prefer the alternate.
Like a previous post said, just make sure it lies in your base competency (which you have if you've developed it) and is part of your key value proposition.
The cult of efficiency aims to turn craftsmanship into something that only concerns hobbyists. Everything else is optimizing money in vs money out to get as close to possible as revenue being directly deposited into shareholders bank accounts.
Note that even many of those "long knowledge" things people learned are today obsolete, but people that follow them just haven't figured it out yet. See how many of those object oriented design patters just look very silly the minute you use immutable data structures, and have access to functional programming constructs in your language. And nowadays most do. Many seminal books on how to program in the early 2000s, especially those covering "pure" OO, look quite silly today.
And yet despite being largely obsolete in the specifics, gang of four remains highly relevant and useful in the generalities. All these books continue to be absolutely great foundations if you look past their immediate advice.
