Every time I open up X I see this new way you should be interacting with agents. At first it was prompt engineering, then it was MCPs, skills, sub-agents, workflows, loops, the list goes on… Not to mention the tooling on top of it. Are you token-maxxing yet? You aren’t herdr-ing your plannotators? You will fall behind on your orb count if you don’t hurry up and ralph wiggum your agent lifecycle. What stack are you running? Gstack, pstack, tstack? Get in loser, you’re falling behind!
All of those things while sounding made up, are sadly very real.
There’s some FOMO going around too, I see people following, trying to catch up, burning millions upon millions of tokens, and still I never see anything actually shipped. It almost reminds me of performative software engineering, and it’s because we’re all having somewhat of an identity crisis.
There are a few different things happening all at once. First, a lot of engineers tied their identity to what they did, heck most people do this. It’s the customary greeting “Hello who are you and what do you do?” It used to be a point of pride to say software engineering, or in fact a lot of times people would dumb it down for the layman: “I make apps” or “I design websites.”
However, thanks to AI it doesn’t hold the same weight that it used to. Honestly a lot of times you’ll hear a response along the lines of “oh that’s cool I just built an app myself” and then they’ll be using something like Lovable, Base44 or maybe even Replit (nahh who am I kidding)...
So people need a new way to differentiate themselves: “I burn more tokens than you do, so in fact I am a better engineer”, or “my stack is far more complicated than yours so obviously I both outship and outrank you.”
Additionally, there is a whole crowd trying to sell into that insecurity. These are modern day charlatans peddling their wares, only instead of snake oil they are selling you on their own personal flavor of ai psychosis, and sadly it’s very contagious. Do not buy into the hype train.
Early on in the AI cycle while I was still building Outerbase, the first GPT api was released. Almost immediately, we had other companies trying to sell us on their fine-tuned models. They were going to have the BEST sql querying model out there, specifically for that use case, that outperformed and undercut the competition. I didn’t hold my breath, in fact I just waited and then 4 came out, and you know what it wrote pretty good SQL, and then after that we had reasoning models, and then they just kept getting better.
The same thing is happening to all of the tooling and workflows around AI, you are better off rawdogging a prompt than spending cycles trying to learn today’s flavor of the week process. The models will just get better.
As I write this out, Grok Bot is sending me hourly updates of things I’m missing out on (the irony isn’t lost here), Claude code is writing a new tool to review designs, and Cloudflare OS is running through some PRs to help find any issues that I might have missed during a manual review. This may sound a bit antithetical to what I had written already, but there was no extra process or secret sauce involved, I opened up the latest SOTA model, entered a prompt and let it cook.
Also you might be asking yourself, why are you writing a tool to review designs? You just said you don’t need all of this tooling. Yes and no, the beauty of this is you get to roll your own processes, you don’t have to buy into someone else’s. Software has never been more personal and easy to ship, so I urge you to just try prompting your favorite model, find any gaps, and from there (if there are any) build what you need. Don’t buy into the hype, the FUD, or the superiority that comes from masses telling you that if you aren’t using $NewTool you’re NGMI.
So if you feel behind right now don’t worry you aren’t. Every day the game changes, the models get smarter, kingdoms rise and fall, you’re not missing anything. There’s no special tool or workflow preventing you from being a 1000x ai developer. Pick a model, prompt it to build the thing that brings you joy (and heck if for some reason stringing together a bunch of tools does it then so be it), and just let the timeline sort itself out.
Remember nobody really knows anything…
Ship and be happy.