Technical skills: - Launch my own hand-rolled paper trading solution by mid to late 2026. I want to focus on strategies that prevents heavy losses, rather than actively looking for profits. If I succeed, go live in 2027. - I hope to complete 3 semesters with a B or above in the ongoing Online Masters Degree program I've enrolled for. - Do more coding with AI. - Be prepared for job interviews - even though I have no p…
Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
161–170 of 433 posts
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#162Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#163Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the end the person in charge is liable either way, in different ways.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#165I'd like to learn a little bit about electronics and hardware. At the moment, I have a child's mental model like you plug something into the wall and then it "powers on". I couldn't really tell you what properties make something a conductor or not, and I also couldn't tell you various components like capacitors do. It's actually quite fun in that I have a pretty clear plan for learning about this stuff but because I'…
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#166Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#167Earlier 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 honestly curious about your point on productivity boost. Are you saying that you can write tests at the same speed as AI can? Or is it the point that tests written by AI is of much lower quality that is not worth using them? I am at the role of solo-preneur now and I see a lot of benefit from AI. But then I read posts like yours that experienced devs don't see much value in AI and I start to doubt the things I d…
When I’m writing my own code I can verify the logic as I go and coupled with a strong type system and a judicious use of _some_ tests its generally enough for my code to be correct.
By comparison the AI needs more tests to keep it on the right path otherwise the final code is not fit for purpose.
For example in a recent use case I needed to take a json blob containing an array of strings that contained numbers and needed to return an array of Decimals sorted in ascending order.
This seemed a perfect use case - a short well defined task with clear success criteria so I spent a bunch of time writing the requirements and building out a test suite and then let the AI do its thing.
The AI produced ok code, but it was sorted everything lexicographically before converting to a Decimal rather converting to Decimals first and sorting numerically so 1000 was less than 900.
So I point it out and the AI says good point, you’re absolutely correct and we add a test for this and it goes again and gets the right result but that’s not a mistake I would have made or needed a test for (though you could argue it’s a good test to have).
You could also argue that I should have specified the problem more clearly, but then we come back to the point that if I’m writing every specific detail in English first, it’s faster for me just to write it in code in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#168I want to draw again. I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école . Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#169I 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…
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#170My main ones are career focused: - Vastly and in depth expand my knowledge of data architecture approaches. I'm an analytics engineer but have no experience in high level planning of architecture and I feel like I'm missing a lot of knowledge of the field. - Learn data engineering skills like handling event streams. I'm very happy with my analytics engineer position, but it seems like standard data engineering is a v…
Sell first. Building the tech is just an excuse to not learn how to sell. You don't really know what customers really want until you start asking for money.