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

To me it seems you not only want to learn how to code/write software but also to learn how to make dinner and be with family, how to game with friends, and how to recharge on weekends.

Learning it all is also about learning those other things, too.

This has helped me a lot, makes me realize I want to learn how to relax better, to sleep better, and to slow down better.

Thank you!

Relearning and reconnecting..

Buy the cassette 4-track I had in ‘93 and reconnect with my teenage self - record whole songs on it, not worrying about sound quality and knob tweaking. It is what it is.

Here are mine:

- Build something boring that makes money. Excitement is optional; users are not.

- Use AI less like a chatbot and more like infrastructure, background processes that think while I sleep.

- Go back to fundamentals that compound, graphics, systems, taste.

- Experiment selectively; curiosity without commitment.

- Invest in people, not “networking.” Fewer pings, more real conversations.

- Protect focus like equity.

I’m perfectly comfortable and used to delegating, but delegation requires trust that the result will be fit for purpose.

It doesn’t have to be exactly how I would do it but at a minimum it has to work correctly and have acceptable performance for the task at hand.

This doesn’t mean being super optimized just that it shouldn’t be doing stupid things like n+1 requests or database queries etc.

See a sibling comment for one example on correctness, another one related to performance was querying some information from a couple of database tables (the first with 50,000 rows the next with 2.5 million)

After specifying things in enough detail to let the AI go, it got correct results but performance was rather slow. A bit more back and forthing and it got up to processing 4,000 rows a second.

It was so impressed with its new performance it started adding rocket ship emojis to the output summary.

There were still some obvious (to me) performance issues so I pressed it to see if it could improve the performance. It started suggesting some database config tweaks which provided some marginal improvements but was still missing some big wins elsewhere - namely it was avoiding “expensive” joins and doing that work in the app instead - resulting in n+1 db calls.

So I suggested getting the DB to do the join and just processing the fully joined data on the app side. This doubled throughout (8,000 rows/second) and led to claims from the AI this was now enterprise ready code.

There was still low hanging fruit though because it was calling the db and getting all results back before processing anything.

After suggesting switching to streaming results (good point!) we got up to 10,000 rows/second.

This was acceptable performance, but after a bit more wrangling we got things up to 11,000 rows/second and now it wasn’t worth spending much extra time squeezing out more performance.

In the end the AI came to a good result, but, at each step of the way it was me hinting it in the correct direction and then the AI congratulating me on the incredible “world class performance” (actual quote but difficult to believe when you then double performance again).

If it has just been me I would have finished it in half the time.

If I’d delegated to a less senior employee and we’d gone back and forth a bit pairing to get it to this state it might have taken the same amount and effort but they would’ve at least learnt something.

Not so with the AI however - it learns nothing and I have to make sure I re-explain things and concepts all over again the next time and in sufficient detail that it will do a reasonable job (not expecting perfection, just needs to be acceptable).

And so my experience so far (much more than just these 2 examples) is that I can’t trust the AI to the point where I can delegate enough that I don’t spend more time supervising/correcting it than I would spend writing things myself.

Edit: using AI to explain existing code is a useful thing it can do well. My experience is it is much better at explaining code than producing it.

Definitely something akin to this for me too. My ability to concentrate has definitely fallen off since my younger years, precipitously since 2020.

That and I'm trying to re-learn Spanish to a useful degree¹ - better attentiveness to the task would help with that too.

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[1] I did pretty well at GCSE level three decades ago, then never used it again. I fancy spending time over there in future and don't want to be that guy who turns up and expect everyone to speak some English.