On Android Content

In Android-specific communities like r/androiddev or Android Broadcast, there's now quite a lot of negativity about how everything is sliding into AI. People complain that everyone talks only about AI and there's nothing interesting left on the core topic. Most of my own posts lately are also about AI, even though I'm still an Android developer.

Why is that? Because in the Android world, basically nothing is happening. There is no real news except someone bumping a library from version 0.3.0 to 0.3.1. Android Weekly is dry; I haven't seen anything truly interesting there in the last year. It's extremely hard to come up with material for a post or a talk. Finding someone for a meetup or conference who can present something not chewed over three times already, and interesting to anyone besides themselves, is almost impossible. At work, we all deal with narrow, boring specifics of our own projects.

When was the last time you heard news about your stack that you actually cared about, that affected you, made you think? When was the last time you heard about an approach you hadn't heard of before? With AI, those appear day after day.

And yes, everything there changes too fast. In a way, it may even be nice to arrive when things settle down and processes and technologies stabilize. Unless you're sure your current hard skills, without skills for supporting AI-first projects and processes, will still be needed at all.

Early enthusiasts are betting they won't. And that we are not going back. If that's true, it's better to run ahead. My personal bet is that system configuration skill will be the most important one, and all this experience, pattern recognition, and reflection will help me somehow. Grinding hard skills for their own sake is almost pointless (as it always was). Our job has always been to figure out what we don't understand. That part won't change.

Communities or channels stuck in their old stacks are my personal anti-FOMO tool. They remind me that most people still don't grasp what's happening in the world. Former thought leaders included. For many of them, neural nets are still some kind of magic that can't be trusted with anything. Or only now, very slowly, it's starting to click how to use them, and that now they manage projects instead of the other way around.