No, You’re Not Too Late For AI, You’re Just Early To The Work
Why the next decade belongs to engineers who learn how to shape, design, and integrate intelligent systems.
Last week, Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, shared a message from an 18 years old who feared he was already too late for AI. By the time he graduates, he thought, AI would be so advanced that humans would have nothing meaningful left to do.
It sounds dramatic, but many engineers feel the same. The hype is loud. The breakthroughs are fast. It is easy to think the train has already left.
Here is the truth. You are not late. You are only late if you do nothing.
The Hype Hides the Real Work
Andrew’s reply was simple. Yes, AI is powerful. But without custom engineering, it is surprisingly limited. He would not trust an LLM to handle basic tasks like scheduling or resume screening. Not without proper workflow design, context handling, and guardrails.
And that is part most people never see.
People see the demo. They do not see the scaffolding. The integrations. The context windows. The prompt shaping. The retrieval logic. The ten iterations needed before something behaves consistently.
AI is general enough to open new possibilities, not general enough to replace engineering.
This means there is still a huge amount of work ahead. Work only engineers can do.
What I Learned Across My Own Startups
Across all my startup experiences, AI was never the main thing customers wanted. Customers never came to me saying “please add AI”. They came with painful problems. Slow operations. Chaos. Inefficiency. Confusion.
AI helped make the solution smoother. Sometimes it improved productivity. Sometimes it improved the user experience. But the real win was solving the customer problem, not dropping a model into the product.
Still, every time AI become part of the solution, I learned something new. Agents. Tooling. Memory. Retrieval. Evaluation. Vectors. ALl the small pieces that make AI actually useful in production.
You do not learn AI by reading. You learn it by building.
That is how Toshi, my latest startup, was born. A household productivity companion that uses every lesson I have gathered from years of shipping. Not because I planned it that way, but because all the small experiments added up.
And it reminded me, I am not late. And you are not either.
AI Does Not Replace Engineers, It Amplifies The One Who Build With It
When building Toshi, the hard part was not the model. Anyone can call an API. The hard part was everything around it. Designing context. Handling memory. Creating predictable behaviour. Making the system safe for real families.
This pattern repeats everywhere.
Models are engines. Engineers are the ones who turn them into vehicles people can actually use.
The engineers who thrive are the ones who know how to:
Shape model behavior
Design context flow
Integrate retrieval
Evaluate outputs
Connect the model to real user value
You do not need to be a researcher, you just need to be someone who builds.
Start Small, But Start Now.
You do not need to build an agent with thirty tools, just pick one workflow in your life and upgrade it with AI.
Automate a test. Summarize your team’s daily standup. Build a small internal assistant. Add retrieval to customer support page. Create a simple coding helper for repetitive tasks.
Small projects teach you more than any course: where models fail, how context shapes accuracy, why retrieval matters, how to design a feedback loop, what makes an AI feature trustworthy.
This knowledge compounds. And compounding is your real advantage.
You Are Not Late
If you start today, you are early.
The tooling is young. The patterns are still forming. The standards are not defined. This is the perfect time to build intuition.
AI will not replace engineers, But engineers who build with AI will outpace those who do not.
So if you have been waiting for a signal, here it is.
Start with one small workflow. Build something. Learn something. Let it grow.
And if you want guidance, I occasionally help engineers and teams think through AI systems, tool choices, and product strategy. Reach out at irwan@macrostack.dev if you need a sounding board.
The door is still wide open. You just need to walk through.