giolaq.dev is the personal website and technical blog of Giovanni Laquidara, a Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon. It covers agentic AI, mobile development, TV apps, and React Native.

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Building Your Career in AI: Real Talk from the Trenches

AI is changing a lot about how we build software, and as someone who has spent years in developer advocacy and cross-platform development, I've been thinking about what that means for our careers.

Inspired by the Best

This post grew out of a career advice talk by Andrew Ng and Lawrence Moroney. A lot of what they said about working in AI right now matched my own experience.

The AI Transformation

Software is being built, deployed, and used differently than it was a few years ago. A few things I've seen from working in developer advocacy:

AI tools are augmenting developers rather than replacing them
Cross-platform skills still matter, since AI needs to run on all kinds of devices
The fundamentals matter more than ever
The human side of the work, communication, empathy, and advocacy, becomes more valuable

Key Takeaways

Stay Current with Tooling

Being one generation behind means working twice as hard for half the output. Set aside weekly time to experiment with new AI tools and models. Typing code isn't the bottleneck anymore. Knowing what to build and how to architect it is.

Business Context Matters

Understanding the "why" makes you more valuable. As Andrew Ng put it, engineers who shape product move fastest, and the ones who talk to users and develop empathy move fastest of all.

The Bifurcation of AI

Lawrence Moroney predicts a split: Big AI pushing toward AGI with ever-larger models, and self-hostable models spreading fast on the other side. It's worth following both tracks.

Watch Out for Technical Debt

"Vibe coding" can pile up technical debt fast. Treat technical debt like financial debt. It compounds if you don't pay it down regularly.

Practical Advice

Avoid the hype and focus on fundamentals. Build real solutions and understand the business side.
Diversify your skills. Cross-platform, mobile, and TV experience give you unique angles on AI.
Stay connected. Attend conferences, contribute to open source, and share what you learn.
Build on your strengths. The intersection of AI with a specific domain is where the opportunities are.

Looking Forward

The developers who do well will be the ones who can connect AI capabilities to real-world problems. There's plenty of room for that, whether you're building AI-powered TV apps, mobile experiences, or developer tools that lean on machine learning.

Originally published on dev.to/giolaq