Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”.

What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon?

Then it hit me.

Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in the hype without understanding the fundamentals.

GREAT. Even as I climb the AI-Native ranks, I apparently am unqualified for any AI-Native job.

If you were screwing around with Auto-GPT in 2023, you'll hit four years of "agentic" experience next year.

Of course, there's not much overlap between that and the way it works now. But then again, I have the same feeling about last year and this year... (e.g. Anthropic just deleted almost their entire system prompt because the models have common sense now.)

That being said, I think there's still value, even today, in playing around with the older models from time the time. (Or with very small recent models, which have similar limitations.)

Some of the habits that teaches you — i.e. careful context management and well crafted examples — do translate well to the modern environment, and give you performance gains and cost savings even with newer models. (In a word, whenever possible, show, don't tell.)

I also lament the loss of the base/text models, which were extraordinarily interesting and fun to play with. But that's a separate discussion :)

Use it in your favor.

You just have to get past the recruiter/talent acquisition where everyone else is getting auto-rejected. You should be doing that anyway.

Just in case, because a lot of people don't know this... When a company lists job requirements they aren't really requirements. Don't skip a job because it says you need X years of Y but you only have X-1.

They're basically writing down a wish list. They don't expect to get it or necessarily even care that much about some of the points.

Also "X years of experience" isn't really asking for literal years. It's a proxy for skill. They mean "as good as the average person who has been doing this for X years". If you're really good at it and can demonstrate it, that's good enough.

Personally, I would avoid "ai-native" companies like the plague; they seem like places full of burnout and delusional expectations.

> Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon?

Not that I am trying to excuse it, but this is not a new thing, nor specific to AI.

Job listings that ask for X years of experience where X years is sometimes literally longer than the technology has even existed has been a staple complaint of developers over my entire career, and I'm old af.

bro, tech hr were asking 6 to 8 years rails experience before dhh (rails creator) was even born.

This has been almost a meme on hacker news for some time. You can google it via hn dot algolia dot com by using the right keywords.

Of course, i exaggerated it a bit, just like a lot of startups and vcs pimp their stuff, just that they do it much more, and they do it for money, while my mine was for fun. ha ha ha.