The next developer I hear say “yeah, but I don’t do artificial intelligence, I don’t know anything about it” is getting a smack on the head. Ladies and gentlemen, we all know the technician’s impostor syndrome, it is a phenomenon that is running wild. Let us try to push back on it, and in this case I want to put my full weight behind it once and for all, as someone who spent most of his life building neural networks and doing research.
You do not need the old knowledge anymore
I can promise you that to do AI as a technician today, you do not need to know any of that stuff. All the PyTorch, TensorFlow and CUDA skills, I flushed them down the toilet. I do not use them anymore, they are not needed. It is not like the old days, when to handle a neural network you had to know the training validation cycles, backpropagation, regularization, forty different kinds of layers, and juggle tensors with seven or eight dimensions. Now the abstractions are sky high. You are dealing with an API. The language model, whether it is only language or multimodal, is a network service. Even the agents being built around it, like the Cheshire Cat, are network services. And the plugins you use in the Cat, or similar objects for building custom agents, have very little to do with the neural network part. They have to do with what goes into the prompt and what you do with the model’s response after it comes back. It is all abstracted away.
Why this makes me angry
Why do I get angry? Because I know so many genuinely sharp people who really know their stuff in tech, with maybe twenty years, ten years of experience on databases, networks, scalability. People I mostly met through Meetups, which I strongly recommend you do: follow the live meetups. And these people constantly tell me, “no, I don’t know AI, I’ll take a look, but AI, I don’t know it.” Meanwhile the AI world is full of every kind of bullshitter. There are people organizing national conferences who have never seen AI even through binoculars, and these guys sell, shake hands, sign contracts, and then guess who they call to actually deliver what they promised blindly and recklessly, and I hope they pay through the nose for it too. They call us.
So, an appeal to the technicians: it is not true that you do not know AI. The point is that you no longer need to know what was necessary before, because you use a microwave without knowing the principles of thermodynamics. What you do have to learn is that this thing is a statistical model, that there are practices to follow, that since it is not traditional software it carries a component of uncertainty. That is the essence of dealing with a language model. After that, it is a tape that produces language. You build the prompt, you send it, it answers, and off you go. It is still computer science, still services inside an architecture.
Get a foot on the ground and get some respect
My encouragement is to plant a foot in this world, because otherwise we are surrounded by bullshitters. The thing I cannot stand in all of this is how much the technicians feel like they are worth less, while the sales guys wander around firing off nonsense that does not hold up anymore. They promise anything to anyone, and I would not even know where to begin.
So, one: yes, you know AI, just start practicing. Two: raise your prices. Three: when one of these bullshitters shows up at your door asking “so, do we need the implementation of this thing?”, you tell him, “No, Chicco, it is not like you pay me now just because you signed a contract without knowing how to do the work and found some sucker to do it for you. No, no, no. You put me directly in touch with the end client, and if I close the deal I will give you a cut, say ten or fifteen percent.” Do not work for these people. Put them in their place.
