There is never ending discussion around AI, both against it and for it. My stance has always been quite neutral, I use AI when it makes sense. Instead of trying to either force it or resist it. I've been steadily using AI for the last few years as a learning assistant and more recently agentic AI the last 6 months.
This brings up a very important question, as a software engineer, what AI topics do I actually care about? Is this a fad or should I be investing time in learning AI?
A few years ago when studying AI you may have spent time learning Pandas, Scikit learn, machine learning, etc. While all that's great, most AI focus has shifted to LLMs and applied AI features within software applications, unless you're in a lower-level machine learning type of role.
Here's where to start:
Learn applied AI feature building. This can be done WITHOUT AI coding it for you. This is exactly what we did in the final 3 sections of Python Mastery. We build the entire pipeline by hand (except the frontend