My non-tech friends still don’t get it. Despite what you’d believe from Twitter, most people still haven’t seen the magic of AI. They don't use agents. They aren't tokenmaxxing. Most aren't really using AI at all, and if they are, it's a glorified search engine replacement.
I couldn’t be more different. I’m hopelessly addicted to AI news and model releases. I constantly message my Hermes agent. I am tokenmaxxing. And yet, somehow I am still the one feeling behind.
That gap is easy to forget when you're inside it. We're three years into the fastest tech transformation the world has ever seen, and it's still day zero for adoption. If you're at the AI Engineer World's Fair, you're among the earliest of early adopters though. By the most aggressive estimates, there are only 40 million software engineers in the world. That sounds like a lot until you realize more than a billion people are suddenly about to be able to write code. They just haven't been immersed in this for the last three years like we have.
So why do we feel so behind? If you're like me, you're overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new releases you're somehow supposed to keep up with. It's easy to get trapped in the hype cycle. What grounds me is remembering how early we actually are. If you're feeling that way this week, I hope this framing helps you too.
We’re paving the way for the wave of people coming next. Much of what we learn here won’t reach them for some time still. So beyond learning for ourselves, we should learn for others and share what we learn. If you see someone feeling lost, at AIE or out there afterward, remind them: they're much farther ahead than behind.
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