Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?

The idea is generalists know a lot about everything and when to pass it off to a subject matter expert.

In 2025, with everything in tech changing by the minute, I’m realizing I need to set boundaries about how deep I go on any particular topic. But I’m unsure how. Particularly if I don’t want to get left behind as things continue to evolve.

Curious how other folks approach this?

Isn't this dictated by your available free time?

Or project-based? If you are a writer, for example, it's usually project based.

Otherwise, if you really have a hard time setting boundaries, then you might be the type to orient yourself around the states of your social circles. They definitely have boundaries when they stop listening or caring.

If you can't say enough is enough yourself, let someone you trust, or in whose competence you trust, do it for you.

I would say something like "when does it stop being useful" but the 'real' infinite game is all about curiosity and there's almost no players, just uninterested and destructive shareholders, so I'm gonna go with "do you have a thread that connects it all or not?" If you don't, and it only leads to more and more excursions, fix that point of depth where some subject still interfaces with the other stuff and stop there.

I stop when I find a solution to the problem. Most of the time the learning happens along the way, not necessarily in the solution itself but all the things you try and iterate on your journey to the solution.

Everything changes in tech by the minute ... but also nothing changes. For web applications it has been HTML, CSS and JS for nearly 30 years. XMLHttpRequest/AJAX came out 25+ years ago. There have been many improvements along the way, like applying design patterns instead of cgi-bin directories with scripts that had a +x modifier on them in the file system. But the base technologies have not changed all that much. We still submit HTML form's with input fields to a back-end server that handles that data. We're still rendering HTML and using CSS to style it. Gone are custom UI toolkits like Flash or Java Applets. Maybe WASM is something to look into but it feels like its not mainstream to me.

If you don't want to get left behind, learn the basic building blocks at a deep level, they don't change much.

I learn what I need in order to achieve my task or solve a problem at hand. So that is the "i know enough" point. And that goes for everything, even my main focus do day to day work. It is good to be aware of some tech/capabilities but learning it only for the sake of learning it is a waste of time as if anything that you do not use, you forget. For example, you can learn 70% of features of a new language you are picking up and that will get you through 99% of your time. There is absolutely no need to learn the remaining 30% of the features that you'll never use.

So in short, learn what you need, but be aware of the options in case you might have a use case for some of them in the future in which case you will know where to look and what to learn.

When I get bored of the topic. I have ADHD so that factors in to this.