You will not have forever to learn the fundamentals of AI engineering and by choosing to ignore this class of technologies you will fall behind in your career like those who did not learn React, Vue and never developed single page application (SPA) knowledge.
Every week I come onto Discord, Slack or X and see new tools for AI engineering and AI-assisted development that solves some gap previous tools struggled with. Some of these tools are developed in-house based on a specific organization’s need and some are publicly available but what is important is that you recognize these tools are being released frequently and each are helping direct the way our industry moves forward. Choosing to ignore the changes to our industry will not slow the change or keep your skillset relevant for longer.
I may be out of step with true AI accelerationists who believe that all jobs will be obsolete in the next 6 months/1 year/5 years (except of course AI pundits, we will always need those apparently). My belief is that our jobs as software engineers will simply shift as they did when the industry moved to high level programming languages, internet applications and mobile apps. The kind of work we did day-to-day changed but there is always someone with capital willing to pay someone else to complete a task for them thus keeping the wheels of commerce moving. What I do think though is that if you ignore the changes happening in our industry you will be competing against younger peers with AI-native skillsets leaving jobs at companies who are last to follow the industry’s trends.
I saw this happen early in my career when Angular and React were released with a lot of engineers choosing to ignore the shift, staying with backend focused web apps and jQuery. This was fine for a few years but as the industry moved on it became harder for those people to find work in forward-thinking companies leaving only the slowest corporates open to them and even now those companies are leveraging SPA technologies.
Given I started my career working in jQuery and vanilla JS sites I did very well contracting at some of these slower companies who were unable to migrate to SPAs for whatever reason. The story was always the same, I would be given an app that had been built up until a specific time, that might mean they used Grunt, perhaps an older version of jQuery, often on .NET or PHP and because the technologies had moved so far beyond what they were doing they struggled to maintain their application, change was difficult and it materially affected their business once these problems surfaced to their customers. My job was often to make some minor changes and release a couple of features that were blocked by their internal team’s lack of capability. Sometimes they would ask me to upgrade their dependencies at least to prevent security issues.
For engineers, you must begin understanding these tools. There is a lot of learning material out there so spend time in the space and find what reaches a high quality bar and what is slop. The ground is moving beneath us with lots of opportunity for those that seek it out. Avoid becoming stagnant and falling behind because it will be hard to catch up later, just like the people trying to learn React for the first time in 2023. If you have concerns about the reliability of AI or its qualities then spend time researching it, learn where it works well and where it needs improvements. Build the tool that solves that problem and make it work for you.