Keeping up with the pace of change in the age of AI

The pace of change in the technology space currently is absolutely crazy. And from what I get when talking to friends and colleagues, it's not just me or my personal feeling. Rather, we feel collectively overwhelmed with how fast things are changing. And "things" includes a lot, like terminology we use, the technology we work with and create, the way we communicate, and much more. The purpose of this blog post is (a) to sort out my own thoughts and (b) inspire others to share their thoughts about keeping up with all the new AI developments. A bonus would be if (c) resulting discussions could help reduce my imposter syndrome.

Keep learning

MCP, A2A, A2UI, AG-UI, harness, orchestration, agent graphs, loop engineering - I never found myself researching so many new concepts at once before, not even when I first started programming or when I joined SAP. And I have to admit, I don't like it. It's overwhelming. As a developer, it was always my way of working and part of my mental model to try and understand as much of the code and technical concepts as possible, but that is getting increasingly harder with the amount of new concepts and information we are faced with. Plus, the whole point of generative AI is to abstract all of the "understanding" away, so you can just express the intent in natural language and the machine goes ahead and does what it does. To me it feels like the eagerness to understand, that used to make a good developer, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I think (hope) this is just a temporary and personal feeling, and that we will never fully hand control over to AI, making human understanding stay relevant and valuable. To make the confusion and irony perfect: It is that human understanding that AI can really help with. LLMs are really good at explaining code and technical concepts.

To sum up my thoughts:

There has never been a worse time to learn new things, and there has never been a better time to learn new things.

Or metaphorically speaking:

It's like someone pulled the rug out from under me (my eagerness to understand seems irrelevant), and then at the same time gave me a new power-rug, that is way better than the old rug (learning is just one prompt away).

The only answer/solution I have for this dilemma is "keep learning". It sounds simple, maybe too simple, but I guess it's all we humans can do. My personal learning strategy is (and always was):

Take (hand-written) notes, they make information stick better.
Ask questions, also (especially) the easy/trivial ones. Chances are, they are not that trivial and exactly the right questions to ask. AI is great for that (and it doesn't judge).
Repeat concepts in your own words to make sure you really got it.
Explain concepts to others, because "while we teach, we learn" (Seneca).
Find a practical example/personal project and actually apply what you learned. That will make you understand and memorize things on a whole new level.

As mentioned, the primary goal of this blog post (and especially the above list) is to sort out my own thoughts. And I can already tell you, writing this blog post helped. I will just keep learning, and I feel like we are all in this together - I can't possibly be the only one feeling overwhelmed with the current pace of change, am I? Please share your thoughts!

This blog post was written by hand, without any AI assistance.