"FOMO is the Mind Killer"

There's real pressure to stay on top of every new AI tool and technology. It can be demoralizing.

Whether you're in engineering, marketing, design, or any other field, we feel the need to evolve our workflows to adopt AI tools, learn to build AI-powered applications, and somehow track every breakthrough that happens seemingly daily if we want to stay relevant.

Coming from experience, trying to stay on top of all these tools will absolutely slow you down. My pro tip this week: drop the FOMO and focus. Not on a tool per se, but how to use generative AI in general. That means learning how to "talk" with these models to get them to do things that bring direct and immediate value to you and/or your job—whether that's getting AI to draft proposals, analyze data, create designs, or write code.

We're dealing with a whole new dynamic here. Generative AI creates tools and apps that create even more tools and apps. The pace is unlike anything we've seen before. You master one framework or tool, and three more have already launched. It's not sustainable to chase everything.

To boot, the barriers to creating with AI are dropping so fast that competitive advantages disappear quickly. What takes you weeks to build, someone else might recreate in days. Yes, you can crank out work a lot faster with these tools growing in numbers and capability by the day, but so can everyone else.

Rather than letting FOMO drive your decisions, focus on what actually makes your work better. Pick the tools that solve real problems for you. Build genuine expertise instead of surface-level familiarity with dozens of platforms. The fundamentals still matter more than knowing every new tool that drops.

Learn how to talk to these tools, using your words, to get them to do things. Focus on that skill above all else. Find a tool that gives you the most mileage to that end and lean into it.

As an engineer, for me it is has been the Anthropic ecosystem and Claude Code specifically, and I've been leaning in for a couple of months. Not to the exclusion of the other generative AI players, but focusing in one space for a while have been immensely productive for me.

I've gained a clear vision for what I believe the future of software engineering work will look like in a year...and it's about clear and concise communication, not just coding syntax mastery.

It’s your words that matter more than the code you can write.