Don't keep up. Much like with news, you'll know when you need to know, because someone else will tell you first.

This is only good advice if you don’t have the need to understand what’s happening on the edge of the frontier. If you do, then you’ll lose on compounding the knowledge from staying engaged with the major developments.

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satvikpendem 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not all developments are equal. Many are experimental branches of testing things out that usually get merged back into the core, so to speak. For example, I knew someone who was full into building their own harness and implementing the Ralph loop and various other things, spending a lot of time on it and now, guess what? All of that is in Claude Code or another harness and I didn't have to spend any amount of time on it because ultimately they're implementation details.

It's like ricing your Linux distro, sure it's fun to spend that time but don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive, it's just another form of procrastination (or perhaps a hobby to put it more charitably).

	▲	vessenes 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that a full linux distro compile as a matter of practice is a waste of time. But, doing it a few times is good if you want to understand your tools. I don’t believe that top tier engineers just skip learning things because they might turn out to be dead-ends or incorporated into tools by someone else; in my experience they tend to be extremely interested in things that seem like minutiae to others when working on the bleeding edge, often implementing their own systems just to more fully understand the problem space. If it’s a day job for someone and they are not ambitious, fine. But we are at hacker news. I would bet 99%+ of top tier software talent could tell you practical experience with ralph loops this year, or a homegrown variety, simply because they are an attempt to solve a very real engineering problem (early exit, shitty code/incorrect responses, poor context window length and capacity), and top tier software people expect more control of their engineering environment, and success using their tools than they’d get by just saying ‘meh, whatever, I don’t get this and I’ll just wait it out.’

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roughly 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This one’s been particularly hard to sit out because the executive and managerial class are absolutely mainlining this stuff and pushing it hard on the rest of the organization, and so whether or not I want to keep up, I need to, because my job is to actually make stuff work and this stuff is a borderline existential risk to the quality of the systems I’m responsible for and rely on.

	▲	hnfong 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thus, in the situation you described, "someone else will tell you first" is your boss.