Half the 'how to become an AI engineer' advice tells you to start with linear algebra. After years on backend, here's the honest, narrower path — what to learn, what to skip, and what the job actually looks like in 2026.
If a junior can ship a feature in a day with Claude Code, what's the senior engineer actually for? The skills that get you promoted in 2026 — and the ones that quietly stopped counting.
Anyone with Cursor and an afternoon can ship a prototype. The gap between that and a production system isn't speed — it's the judgment to know what's actually right. The case for taste as the 2026 differentiator.
Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity — the tools are real, the productivity claims are mostly real, and the new skill is shaping work for an agent rather than doing it. A senior engineer's field notes on what changed and what didn't.
Agents produce code that compiles, passes tests, and is sometimes wrong in ways that no compiler or unit test catches. What an evaluation layer in CI looks like — beyond lint and test — when half the PRs were drafted by a model.