Trying to upskill and AI engineer courses feel like a waste of time

Posted by anchor_software@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 29 comments

I've been trying to upskill into AI engineering and I like the idea of a structured course, but so much of what I'm seeing online focuses too much on the ML aspect of things. Most AI products companies are trying to build are focused on agentic and genAI and don't require actual intimate ML knowledge so it just feels like a waste of time. Understanding attention doesn't actually help with building chatbots or agent systems imo

Anyone else run into this issue/ feel the same?

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CodelinesNL@reddit

Get a Claude Code Pro license (20 euro's a month), look what spec driven development is, and go build stuff.

These courses only exist to make the people who created them money. What I see online (LinkedIn specifically) is that almost all the people who are now building stuff for the AI (like harnesses, skill catalogs, "prompt libraries", memory systems) are the unimaginative ones not bright enough to understand that what they're doing is useless. Not the best people to learn from.

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igharios@reddit

Agree and would suggest questioning the AI decision to learn from it, or make it correct itself. This will be an important way for you to grow as an engineer.

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curious_backend_dev@reddit

I red somewhere(and practice it) that nowadays the best place to read about about AI related stuff is AI chatbots, because the stuff are changing so fast that if you find 3 months old article it can be potentionally outdated.

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Bricktop72@reddit

The space is moving so fast that it feels like most of the classes are out of date by the time I find them.

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

^this. Guarantee we will be in a dramatically different workflow this time next year, maybe won’t even be work bc the AI is that good… who knows… unpredictable times,.. lots of anxiety

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SWEETJUICYWALRUS@reddit

Not even upset I didnt fully commit to the openclaw workflow after the recent changes to force Claude API cost vs usage limits on 3rd party harnesses

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

Not a joke, it feels like it changes every 3 days… I follow this stuff very closely.

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Bricktop72@reddit

Honestly at this point it's so open that you can do something you think is neat and it turns into the next openclaw overnight

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Bricktop72@reddit

Yeah but it's also a hell of a lot of fun to tinker with. Really fighting the urge to just buy a MacMini and just make some probably absolutely stupid agents.

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

The whole agent thing I’m still trying to wrap my head around, I get that I’m behind the tech I just use VSCode with Cline (opus). I’ve searched for tutorials and idk what ppl are doing to get so much productivity - like the whole running a bazillion agents in parallel to rewrite 2 million lines of code... Sth doesn’t smell right there, how is that even reviewable and therefore auditable…

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Bricktop72@reddit

AI!

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CodelinesNL@reddit

Exactly. Most of these are around "prompt engineering" which is hilariously dead now.

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CornPop747@reddit

I think having some ML intuition about what's going on under the under is important. But like others have said, once your senior enough courses are kind of a waste of time. We have AI now instead of Google to build as we go, makes it much faster and easier.

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

You're right, they are kind of a waste of time.

Things are changing too fast and whatever you learned will be outdated before the ink on your AI certificate drys.

That said, last year Google engineers got this 5 day course for free:

https://www.kaggle.com/learn-guide/5-day-genai

I went through it; I think it's pretty good if you're starting from scratch.

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Legal-Trust5837@reddit

Once you're senior enough - read docs and build things. Also you should always be reading a book

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Entuaka@reddit

Always the same book? LotR is ok?

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dfltr@reddit

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is a nice light read on the subject.

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Crannast@reddit

Any self respecting engineer must also read Silmarillion too.

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Entuaka@reddit

I stoped to read novels almost 20 years ago, now I just read technical books.. I never feel for a novel, I should maybe try again

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Bricktop72@reddit

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It makes a lot more sense when you realize 42 is a hallucination due to a bad prompt.

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

It changes too quickly. The stuff told you a year ago about AI is now obsolete.

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shifty_lifty_doodah@reddit

Build your own openclaw. You’ll learn about how the tools work and how well they work

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urko_crust@reddit

If you're looking to buy a course on agentic engineering... Maybe Indy Dev Dan if you get with his personality? I've bought nothing from him, but I've gotten quite a lot from what he puts out on YouTube learning about agent orchestration then playing with the concepts. Not sure if it's quite the topic your looking for

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LeeroiGreen@reddit

If you American name your position and salary and you are hired.

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OtaK_@reddit

don't require actual intimate ML knowledge so it just feels like a waste of time.

Yeah, it's as if pretending using LLMs is a skill is the biggest cope thrown around currently.

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codemuncher@reddit

Well that’s what ai engineering is. Building the ai and such.

Everyone else is just a user.

For example the Claude code devs? By which I mean the anthropic staff who actually wrote Claude code.

Just users.

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