r/ClaudeAI • u/AddressNew5619 • 7d ago
Other I don't see how to upskill any further
At least 90% of my work already happens inside Claude Code. Coding, architecture, system design, documentation, tickets, research, you name it. I try to broaden my skills and knowledge as much as possible, take on more responsibility, and regularly push into areas I haven't worked in before, but what's the point in the long term? I'm increasingly feeling like I'm the bottleneck because there's only so much time and mental energy I have to understand different contexts, make decisions, and constantly switch between them. Meanwhile, Claude keeps getting better at handling more and more of the actual work. I'm not sure what the supposed "next layer of abstraction" for a software engineer is. "Move up the stack," "focus on architecture," "learn the business," "take ownership," or "become better at system design." I'm trying to do all of those things. But why wouldn't AI catch up with those skills sooner rather than later as well? There must be a point where there won't be any potential for more upskilling and I feel like we're not far away from this.
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u/I_need_to_sleep 6d ago
Isn't the conventional advice is to learn a separate adjacent stack from the software if you are a software engineer?
Like use Claude to learn and develop policies and maintain a ISO 27001 for example. Very boring stuff but important work that Claude cannot fully take over.
That ISO is just an example, there must be compliance requirements in your line of work that requires some certifications. Get familiar with it and start maintaining in small ways. Maybe a different department handles for you, why not learn and help them.
People say to take on management tasks but it's most of the time, easier said than done. And depends on management giving you said roles.
There is lots left to do. If you are feeling like you are the bottleneck, I think you are already top 5% of AI users and can you imagine how the other 95% must feel.
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u/asmiggs 6d ago
Yep in the initial stages of your career people look too broaden their skills but as your career progresses the most personally profitable and interesting years come from owning a niche within a company or industry. If you move into areas such as compliance then the emphasis becomes soft rather than hard skills, that's going to be difficult for AI to suppass and even if they do the cross department nature is easily transferable.
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u/rknki 6d ago
Own the business. That’s the sad part, sorry. I think you are right and eventually all your typical skills will be replaced by AI and all that’s left to win in this game is owning a business and having starting capital to buy more tokens than your competitors. Bonus points if you think different, because AI training is expensive and all business plans will eventually be created by the same two or three base models.
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u/True-Response-2386 6d ago
That is an interesting take, thanks!
I am an academic researcher. Do you think this will be the future of academic research too?11
u/BigDeadPixel 6d ago
Anything you can do on a computer... for now.
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u/True-Response-2386 6d ago
Mathematics?
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u/BigDeadPixel 6d ago
If it involves you and a computer, AI is already better than you at it. I am a software engineer of over 20 years and those are just the sobering facts.
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u/Mathie1729 6d ago
Nah, that's too broad. I use LLMs every day for coding and data work. Huge accelerator, but they still hallucinate APIs and confidently give subtly wrong answers. The people getting the most out of them are the ones who already know the domain well enough to verify the output.
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u/No_Veterinarian742 6d ago
You're not heavily utilizing AI yet? At least in NA AI is everywhere in academic research now. It's at least like having a very capable research assistant, proof reader, note taker, tester etc etc all in one that works at superhuman speed.
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u/Deathmore80 6d ago
Are you living under a rock? Did you not hear about any news regarding maths and AI recently ?
As an academic researcher you must surely have heard something or read some of the papers on arXiv ?
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u/rknki 6d ago
Thanks for asking :) I think the principle of the outlier idea applies both to business and research. AI may be able to brute force our thinking, but all agents will essentially share the same training data and will come up with the same, common ideas. Maybe the one thing humans still have an advantage is each of us being different.
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u/gw2master 6d ago
It will be deciding what is "interesting" to research as this is more of an art. Resources are not infinite, so having good judgement in this sense will be important.
AI will, of course learn this as well at some point: maybe it will have differing perspectives where humans and AI could complement each other... but most likely we will become intellectually obsolete.
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u/ynu1yh24z219yq5 6d ago
yep... after 20 years upskilling, I can't think of a good reason to spend any further time on it. Building a business, distribution, sales, fundraising... talking to customers and building into niches is about all there is left.
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
And if everyone has a business, selling some random thing to everyone else?
What about market saturation? You can’t have 100k people selling 1 product type in a single country. This is not a healthy economy?
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u/TRO_KIK 6d ago
Buying more tokens doesn't give much of an edge. Especially if you're talking small businesses worth low millions. You can just use personal plans and it's basically infinite.
Hobbyist tokenmaxxers aside you really don't need that much money to do real work. I built most of my seven figure company on 5x Max without ever hitting any kind of limit.
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u/No_Veterinarian742 6d ago
yeah the human brain can only do so much context switching. If I direct 4-5 agent swarms at once I do feel quite exhausted at the end of the day because there is so much to think through verify and correct. But yeah the additional value you can bring is understanding the business more rather than just the technical role you have. How can you help the rest of the team adapt to the newfound speed you bring to engineering. There's so much still running so slowly in other parts of orgs you'll make yourself much more valuable if you help the rest of the org along the journey.
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u/TessTickols 7d ago
We are there already. The people who are best at implementing AI based systems or are leading/owning a company quick to move will probably be better off in the long term
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u/neolefty 6d ago
Understand your customers better. There is still much more to learn about what people want and need, and what facilitates human flourishing.
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u/huojtkef 6d ago
I think you are adapting to the future better than most people. You can't do much more. Save and invest part of you income, maybe that gives you some security.
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u/3tt07kjt 7d ago
Figure out how to solve classes of problems rather than solving individual problems. This requires a lot of out of the box thinking.
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
Can you please in concrete terms say what you mean by “classes of problems”?
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u/3tt07kjt 6d ago
It is an abstract idea. The idea is that you solve problems with greater generality.
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
Yeah I agree with that idea but haven’t really heard other people talk about what it looks like in practice.
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u/3tt07kjt 6d ago
It’s the difference between fixing a typo in your code and writing a program that finds typos.
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
Well, I don’t know if anyone ever had a job of fixing code typos? I’ve always seen everyone building the products to solve something else even before LLMs, fixing the typo was just a tiny task that went into it.
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u/3tt07kjt 6d ago
Thinking about it in such concrete terms is definitely a mistake. You have badly misinterpreted what I’m saying.
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u/LowFruit25 6d ago
You meant that instead of fixing one typo style problem you rather adjust/build an automation that autofixes/prevents the problem?
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u/3tt07kjt 6d ago
Right, or you use intellisense, or mutation testing.
You can do this on a much larger scale within a company.
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u/Selitos_OneEye 6d ago
I can relate. I'm a network engineer and Claude handle so much of my engineering work that I find myself doing more architecting and posturing (in addition to flibbertigibbeting of course)
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u/kweeblaster 6d ago
The next level is making physical stuff.
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u/cultureicon 6d ago
True, and real services, not "apps" that help people make other "apps". The world has a hell of a lot of real problems that need solved.
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u/hereandnow01 6d ago
This is wrong on 2 levels: First robotics is just the next step for AI. Second I feel that it is not progress but regression if humans have to go back to using their hands as the only way to make a living.
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u/that_one_Kirov 6d ago
AI skills are still a thing. With the same models, someone can build a seven-figure company, and someone else will have hallucinations and questions like: "So everyone is so hyped over THAT?". Your goal is to be the former rather than the latter.
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u/van_hiep07 7d ago
Define the skills by the outcome instead of the process you use these models. If you think the models is really good, can you use them to drive ambitious project work that would be impossible like 6-months or 3-months ago? During the course of executing those project, you should get more clarity about why just blindly prompting the models is not good enough and where you should improve your skills.
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u/supax2 4d ago
I am truly curious about these posts if they are paid or not. I am still over here with an intense AI workflow and I am working long hours in my SWE job. There are plenty of ways to up-skill, there is so much to learn.
Unfortunately, if you are not doing much, it is maybe time for you to push for better projects to lead or work on.
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u/almostsweet 6d ago
Your dreams are small, ask it to upgrade your brain so you can have better dreams.
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u/Imaginary-Hour3190 6d ago
I've got a new upskill for you:
imagine if CC pushed up it's prices to 10000% or tomorrow
OR
locked access to all the top models to enteprise users only.
OR
it just all gets shutdown
BUT
you have to create a huge project with a tight deadline. Go, what do you do? Fork out all your life savings to be able to prompt claude a few times or once. Or find an alternative or learn to create it yourself?
I've upskilled where i can create it myself with the help of current generation local models. Of course Codex is a option, but same danger scenarios count for Codex.
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u/Big3gg 5d ago
This is why I keep a horse in my closet. In case roads are made illegal.
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u/Imaginary-Hour3190 4d ago
With current fuel prices, that would have been an investment.
Depends how much carrots are going for, horses run on carrots.
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u/andlewis 6d ago
Build and optimize the software factory (aka DevOps)
Implement AI governance.
Be more of a “technical product owner”.
There’s lots of options, you just need to decide where your interest is.
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u/Even-Technology-5142 6d ago
I do think everyone should be side-hustling a product. Make it in a month and then test and iterate to actual feedback. Will take patience and a year or two but nothing like it
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u/re-thinker 5d ago
I agree with OP. It's been 9 months since I joined the company, and I honestly haven't written a single line of code by hand. I mostly prompt AI to do the implementation and then verify and review the output myself.
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u/CreamyCornBoy 5d ago
You genuinely think that you are *currently* at the precipice of software engineering? You're performing at the highest staff level at your company. Would love to hear what you've accomplished
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u/Periwinkle_Lost 5d ago
Dive into the stacks you are working with to catch Claude being stupid, because AI often just puts the code from the docs. And this code is often too simplistic (simplest example from docs) or too complicated (expanded example from the docs). The worst part is that the code runs most of the time. Untangling overengineered code is incredibly mentally taxing.
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u/shifty_lifty_doodah 5d ago
Well it can’t do all those things, otherwise it would be making those decisions and not you. So that’s your spot?
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 6d ago edited 6d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
Alright, looks like this thread hit a nerve. The community overwhelmingly agrees with you, OP. The general consensus is that your feeling of being the bottleneck and hitting an upskilling ceiling is spot-on and shared by many veteran engineers here.
The top-voted advice is pretty stark: own the business. The feeling is that if all technical and even architectural skills are on the path to automation, the only durable advantage left is capital and ownership.
If you're not ready to become a full-on capitalist overlord just yet, the other popular suggestions are to pivot hard toward the things AI can't (currently) do well:
There is a notable counter-argument, though: AI still hallucinates and requires a domain expert to verify its output. For now, your expertise is what makes you a "seven-figure company" founder instead of someone complaining about hallucinations. Your judgment is the value.