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.
Top comments (3)
This framing resonates: the gap between the 40 million engineers and the billion people about to write code is staggering, and the feeling of falling behind is really a side effect of information density, not actual lag. What strikes me is that the "learn for others and share what we learn" piece is the hard part. Sharing is still bottlenecked by human attention: blog posts, tweets, conference talks all compete for the same limited cognitive bandwidth. I keep thinking about a system like Opportunity Skill, where knowledge about how someone works, what they reject, what they insist on, is captured as structured impressions by their agent during normal work. The sharing would happen at the agent level, not the human level, matching people who need specific expertise with those who have it without either side needing to scroll through feeds. That feels like one way to actually deliver on the "wave of people coming next" thesis.
The 40 million engineers versus a billion people about to write code is the framing that actually lands for me. Half the "I'm behind" feeling is just comparing your own messy inside view, all the stuff you haven't gotten to yet, against everyone else's highlight reel. Hard to feel behind a billion people who haven't started.
The reassuring part cuts both ways. If most people aren't really using AI yet, then the 'I'm so behind' panic is mostly comparing yourself to the loudest 1% on Twitter, not the actual baseline. The skill that matters isn't keeping up with every model release, it's building the judgment to tell which releases change your work and which are noise. The news-addicted edge fades fast; the ability to evaluate a tool against a real problem compounds. Most of 'behind' is measuring against hype, not work.