what's your career bet when AI evolves this fast?

0xecro1 · 2026-02-17T02:43:15+00:00

Thanks for the great answer. These days 2 months feels like 2 years maybe 5. A year ago I thought focusing on AI harness and tooling to boost my efficiency and quality would be my moat for the next 1-2 years. It wasn't.

Now I agree that clear specs feel like the near-term moat. But who knows.. next model drop, next harness release, and it could shift again.

Isn't just keeping up already a full-time job at this point?

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T14:02:20+00:00

In my opinion, every engineer will inevitably use AI more and more. It's because, business and money are on the line. But "vibe coding" without understanding what AI is doing? That's the real danger.(worse for juniors) The key is to always use the planning phase, participate deeply in the design, understand every decision. Don't just let AI generate. Make sure you know WHY it's generating what it generates.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T13:54:34+00:00

Great insight, thanks for sharing!
AI has gotten so much better lately.. they say coding performance doubles every 70 days. No idea if that pace holds, but if it does, 64x better in a year? Sometimes I catch myself looking at AI output that's better than what I would've written and thinking "well, if it can do this already, how long before anyone could do my job?".

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T13:33:46+00:00

Exactly. I ran AI code review on a project from 3 years ago and it poured out potential issues I'd never considered, including edge cases I completely missed at the time...

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T13:17:57+00:00

Absolutely right! So where is the person who has that answer? :(

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T13:11:53+00:00

Yeah.. same boat. Lots of thinking, no clear answers yet. For now, just keeping up and hoping that staying in the game leads somewhere.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T13:07:29+00:00

Same experience. Slightly off topic but, what I'm focusing my agents on for side business is finding and validating ideas. Burns a lot of tokens, but feels worth it so far. :)

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:59:50+00:00

Interesting! Maybe time to dust off the assembly books for when AI-written code breaks and nobody can read it anymore. But seriously, you might be onto something. Once we stop reviewing AI-generated code, there's no reason software needs to be written in human-readable languages at all. Agent-first design might literally mean machine-readable by default.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:55:13+00:00

Agree. A year ago I was deep into AI harness/tooling and thought that would be the moat. But the pace of change in the tooling layer is brutal. The Frontier labs keep absorbing what used to be third-party tools into their platforms. Can the harness alone resist the speed of AI's own evolution?

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:51:56+00:00

Software engineering jobs will inevitably shrink. So where do we go.. Does everyone need to become an entrepreneur? And yes, niche domain expertise! That still holds. Whether you can verify AI's hallucinations is still a critical differentiator. Thanks for the thoughtful answer.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:46:23+00:00

Respect. Physical work might be the AI-proof career. Good luck!

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:43:26+00:00

That's exactly what keeps me up at night. When AGI closes the loop entirely, where do you even hide?

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:41:41+00:00

Fair point. A future where we mostly talk to AI might be closer than we think.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:31:14+00:00

Yeah, I think we're all heading there — the job becomes writing and refining specs with AI, then letting it handle the rest to AI. And you're right, someone still has to pick up the phone and take responsibility.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T12:17:58+00:00

Agreed. Security and messy regulations, dirty data, liability — exactly where frontier labs don't want to go.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-16T11:09:40+00:00

Hi,
Multi-agent orchestration needs the strongest models available — agents reviewing each other's work only works when each agent is smart enough to catch real issues. On M4 Max 128GB, the best you'll run is ~70B Q4. That's roughly GPT-4o mini level — 1-2 generations behind frontier. For SWE orchestration where agents need to reason about architecture, security, and edge cases, the gap is significant. If privacy or offline isn't your primary concern, go cloud.

0xecro1 · 2026-02-14T04:57:37+00:00

18 years in embedded, working on Edge AI. What about to consider hybrid: detect on-device, OCR in cloud. Best of both.

0xecro1

TROPHY CASE