Ask HN: List of skills to survive the AI tsunami
16 cookiemonsieur 7 6/5/2025, 7:34:11 AM
With the advent of AI and the hype bubble around it, I was thinking of prompt engineering and developing MCP servers / agents.
Do you know of anything else that would help mid-level / senior software and platform engineers ride the wave ?
Vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate) and building RAG systems. Tons of companies need this now and most devs don't know it yet.
Understanding model fine-tuning and when it's worth it vs just better prompting. Also get comfortable with AI ops - monitoring model performance, dealing with hallucinations, cost optimization. The boring stuff that actually matters in production.
And yeah, just stay curious and adaptive. Half the tools we use today didn't exist 18 months ago.
* Transmission engineering - reverse engineering, extending, and creating transmission schemes.
* Test automation - Automate the shit out of your applications and job with home grown test automation capabilities (not some big third party test automation tool)
* Performance - Actually measure things with actual numbers to show employers just how shitty/awesome their applications are with actual evidence.
* Knowing your software platform at the lowest level, not some vanity or unnecessary abstraction bullshit
* Knowing people. If you are bad at the soft skills, or are too neurodivergent to actively listen, AI probably should take your job.