I feel similar, I'm not against the idea that maybe LLMs have gotten so much better... but I've been told this probably 10 times in the last few years working with AI daily.

The funny part about rapidly changing industries is that, despite the fomo, there's honestly not any reward to keeping up unless you want to be a consultant. Otherwise, wait and see what sticks. If this summer people are still citing the Opus 4.5 was a game changing moment and have solid, repeatable workflows, then I'll happily change up my workflow.

Someone could walk into the LLM space today and wouldn't be significantly at a loss for not having paid attention to anything that had happened in the last 4 years other than learning what has stuck since then.

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kaydub 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The funny part about rapidly changing industries is that, despite the fomo, there's honestly not any reward to keeping up unless you want to be a consultant.

LMAO what???

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roadside_picnic 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've lived through multiple incredibly rapid changes in tech throughout my career, and the lesson always learned was there is a lot of wasted energy keeping up.

Two big examples:

- Period from early mvc JavaScript frontends (backbone.js etc) and the time of the great React/Angular wars. I completely stepped out of the webdev space during that time period.

- The rapid expansion of Deep Learning frameworks where I did try to keep up (shipped some Lua torch packages and made minor contributions to Pylearn2).

In the first case, missing 5 years of front-end wars had zero impact. After not doing webdev work at all for 5-years I was tasked with shipping a React app. It took me a week to catch up, and everything was deployed in roughly the same time as someone would have had they spent years keeping up with changes.

In the second case, where I did keep up with many of the developing deep learning frameworks, it didn't really confer any advantage. Coworkers who I worked with who started with Pytorch fresh out of school were just as proficient, if not more so, with building models. Spending energy keeping up offered no value other than feeling "current" at the time.

Can you give me a counter example of where keeping up with a rapidly changing area that's unstable has conferred a benefit to you? Most of FOMO is really just fear. Again, unless you're trying to sell your self specifically as a consultant on the bleeding edge, there's no reason to keep up with all these changes (other than finding it fun).

	▲	kaydub 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You moved out of webdev for 5 years, not everybody else had that luxury. I'm sure it was beneficial to those people to keep up with webdev technologies.

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recursive 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If everything changes every month, then stuff you learn next month would be obsolete in two months. This is a response to people saying "adapt or be left behind". There's so much thrashing that if you're not interested with the SOTA, you can just wait for everything to calm down and pick it up then.

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baq 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If the trend line holds you’ll be very, very surprised.