Quit trying to keep up with every new AI tool and keep building

In this blog post

1.Look for people who are working in public and demonstrating real value

2.Keeping learning by doing

I think a lot of developers are quietly afraid right now. Not because AI is going to replace them any time soon. Most experienced developers don’t actually believe that.

The fear is more subtle than that. They’re afraid of getting left behind, learning the wrong tools or building the wrong way. Afraid that younger developers are adapting faster or that others understand all of this better.

I feel that pressure too.

I use Claude® Code CLI constantly. Every day. At this point I can’t imagine building software without it. I’m dramatically faster than I was a year ago, and the amount of experimentation I can do now is honestly kind of incredible. Yet when I open Reddit, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitter, YouTube, even TikTok, suddenly I’m hearing about:

New coding agents

Orchestration systems

Autonomous workflows

MCP setups

Self-healing applications

AI IDEs

AI browsers

AI terminals

AI everything

And every one of them is apparently “the future.” How do you know what to ignore and what to adopt?

Look for people who are working in public and demonstrating real value

There’s a lot of confusion around productivity in AI conversations. People equate productivity with:

More generated code

Faster feature completion

One-shot demos

Or “look what I built in six minutes”

But none of that necessarily creates value. I can generate a giant pull request full of AI code this afternoon. That doesn’t mean it survives:

Integration tests

Security review

Observability requirements

Real users doing unpredictable human things

Real productivity is delivering value to users more quickly. AI helps with that, but developers waste enormous amounts of time chasing hype right now. Good marketing does not automatically equal good value. I’ve seen tools receive massive amounts of attention that, once I dug deeper, simply didn’t improve my workflow in any meaningful way.

The tools that matter are the ones that genuinely make you more productive while still allowing you to maintain understanding and control over what you’re building. That balance matters to me. I don’t want to become disconnected from the software itself.

Yes, developers should pay attention to what other people are doing. Part of being a software engineer has always been committing yourself to continuous learning. You should read Reddit. You should follow developers on social media. You should pay attention to emerging workflows and ideas.

But you also need to learn how to distinguish hype from value. Look for the people who are actually building things in public. Look for the people sharing process instead of certainty.

Ask yourself: “Was this content created to share knowledge, or to drive engagement?”

Those are very different things.

The people I trust most right now are usually the ones showing unfinished work, explaining tradeoffs, discussing failures, and sharing lessons learned from actual implementation. Not the people pretending they’ve solved software development permanently because they chained six agents together in a demo video.

That’s exactly how I ended up changing workflows myself. A friend of mine seemed to be moving leaps and bounds faster than I was. He had piles of documentation, a giant application, and everything looked polished and organized. So, I asked him to show me what he was using.

That was the first time I saw Claude Code CLI in action. Everything clicked. It had access to the filesystem. It could read the actual code I wanted modified. It could maintain context across the project. It could document what it was doing and why.

For the first time, AI coding stopped feeling like a clever autocomplete tool and started feeling like a genuine development partner. I instantly saw productivity, and it was real, not hype.

Keeping learning by doing

The developers who are adapting well right now are not the ones consuming the most AI content. They’re the ones building with AI consistently.

You need reps. The same way you learn almost anything else. You do not become a better golfer by watching YouTube videos about golf swings. At some point you need to stand over the ball and embarrass yourself for a while.

AI coding is the same thing. You need to build things. Not startup ideas. Not the next billion-dollar SaaS. Not some massive architecture astronaut project. Solve a problem in your own house. Maybe your family needs a better way to plan meals. Maybe you want to track something like the number of times you turn off light switches. Maybe you want a better view into your finances.

Those are the best projects right now because you already understand what success looks like. You can judge whether a tool helped you succeed. And you develop real skill that will transfer to whatever the next big thing is.

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