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Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

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Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#151

Post by jstummbillig »

imron wrote: post #46
pan69 wrote: post #28

I want to quit my cosy, well paying, job and start building the products I have been wanting to build for quite some years now. I have been starting to use AI about 12 months ago and, as an experienced engineer of 30+ years professionally, I am blown away by how productive it makes me. What I used to be able to do in a week now takes me a day, what I used to be able to do in a month now takes me week, etc. So, 2026 i…

How are you using AI and what sort of software are you building? I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results. Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not sp…

I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work?

You will certainly understand a program better where you write every line of code yourself, but that limits your output. It's a trade-off.

The part that makes it work quite well is that you can also use the LLM to better understand the code where required, simply by asking.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#152

Post by spit2wind »

CoffeeDeSanta wrote: post #109

I was lost not sure of my career and I put too much focus on it, since now things are more stable, I want to: - Work on projects that actually interest me, not just to fill the CV. - Learn CS fundamentals but I know web development but not how computers work under the hood. I have been ignoring my mental and physical health for years, so working on these is a top priority.

Do you have any particular resources lined up?

Regarding how computers work under the hood, i can recommend Nand2Tetris.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#153

Post by jstummbillig »

Nextgrid wrote: post #132

Tech skills: * Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChai…

> I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI

I'd be interested to learn more!

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#154

Post by mitjam »

I want to learn to launch and grow a paid app, I‘ve built a few SaaS and installed apps up to a point of „80% ready to launch“, but did not go all the way. I don’t quite know what‘s holding me back but I realized that this is what’s most important for me to learn when it comes to my software side endeavor.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#155

Post by brailsafe »

jstummbillig wrote: post #151
imron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you using AI and what sort of software are you building? I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results. Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not sp…

I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work? You will certainly understand a program better where you write every line of code yourself, but that limits your output. It's a trade-off. The part that makes it work quite well is that you can also use the LLM to better understand the code where required, simply by asking.

> I am guessing: Maybe you are not used to or comfortable with delegating work?

The difference between delegating to a human vs an LLM is that a human is liable for understanding it, regardless of how it got there. Delegating to an LLM means you're just more rapidly creating liabilities for yourself, which indeed is a worthwhile tradeoff depending on the complexity of what you're losing intimate knowledge of.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#158

Post by Nextgrid »

jstummbillig wrote: post #153
Nextgrid wrote: post #132

Tech skills: * Building LLM-backed products. I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI (as opposed to slapping a useless chatbot on everything just to claim to use AI) and for now I’ve been calling the APIs directly from Django; which while works, makes me write tons of boilerplate for basic tasks like an UI for testing prompts and so on. It seems like this must be a solved problem so I’d need to look around (LangChai…

> I’ve recently had a real use-case for AI I'd be interested to learn more!

Can’t disclose too much yet without nuking my competitive advantage, but basically it’s using LLMs to parse lots of scraped data to identify prospective customers in a certain niche - not in the way “these guys might need it” but more like “these guys have explicitly said they need it”, just that the “say” can be in many different channels and formats, and the LLM’s job is to ingest that firehose of trash and pick out the gems.

All in all a pretty basic and boring use-case that I’m sure I’m not the only one doing, but it’s frankly the first use-case I have where the probabilistic and imperfect nature of LLMs is actually fine.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#159

Post by duckydude20 »

- "expand my social circle" same here, try to make real world connection not just technical connections but with people i can hang out with, friday night parties, trips, etc. apart from work i don't have any connections. opportunities are lacking and idk how to increase my chance.

if anyone in Bengaluru, India having meetups invite me, duckydude20 at gmail.com

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