Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What this playbook covers If you stepped away from engineering for a year, or five, or ten, and you want to come back into AI work, this is the plan. It is written for people who used to ship software and stopped for a reason that had nothing to do with ability: a child, a parent, an illness, a move between India and the UK, a business that did not survive, or simply a decision to do something else for a while. It assumes you can still write code, that your last working environment predates the current generation of models and tools, and that you have about six months and a few hours a day. Three things have changed since most returners left, and they set the shape of the plan. First, the tooling: as of September 2026 the day-to-day stack for an AI engineer is Claude Code, Cursor or Codex…
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