Reject FOMO; embrace JOMO

During the last months, I have been trying to be up to date to the newest features and breakthroughs that the AI is having almost every week; turns out to be very exhausting!

The causes of this could be starting from information overload to production paralysis, but then I realized how paralyzed I was, so I decided to recap what happened in AI until now so that we don't lose focus on where we come from, and where are we heading to - so maybe it can help you as well -.

First of all; don't be scared.

Fearing of AI was one of the main problems I had at the very beginning of the AI burst:

Is AI gonna replace my job?

Am I going to stop enjoying programming?

Those are the real questions I was doing to myself when it all started around 2022-2023. Now, to me it seems pretty obvious that the AI is another layer of abstraction that is starting to build up and that means, we are not going to do the same in less time, but more in same time.

One clear example is how bottleneck is right now the Pull Requests, in the end.. a PR is a seal of approval signed by someone to be blamed in the future if something fails. I am curious how AI is going to solve this and give bandwidth to real swarm of agents working together.

Talking about bullshit AI sells.

A lot of influencers have bloated all social networks with information and news about AI that is the most polemic so that it creates engagement; to me it's like as if 2017 Youtube clickbait videos and Stackoverflow self answering have a common child; all people trying to heat you up with nonsense, so that you come up and respond: "Hey! that is not true!".

This almost happened to me last week, when I came across a post on LinkedIn from a guy that claimed to be a senior AI Engineer, talking about the discrepancy about AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md and his magical solution to give to all of us, the plebs, was to maintain both markdown files separately! (and we should thank him though apparently... right?). My first impulse was to warm my fingers to start typing "have you heard about symbolic links?". But then, I understood the intention of the post, so I didn't respond, and moved on.

I am sure that you too have dealt with this recently. I know how you feel.

My take on this: try to "get it" as soon as possible so that you can move on to the next - hopefully - interesting post; this of course applies to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, etc. Doing nothing and move on is, by far, the thing with most impact you can do against them, as they sink on the ocean because of the algorithm punishing them.

The other side of these kind of posts is to treat you like you are being left behind, so if you don't hop into the hype train, basically you are stupid and you won't be able to recover from this again.

Well, you know that? Maybe that's not true.

My solution to this: try it yourself, have your own opinion, and try to investigate about that apparently new repository or framework or plugin that is going to change the world, so that you have a sense of how interesting it is or not.

So, what do we do?

There are few ways to address this problem, but, as always, the biggest problems have simplest solutions.

• Go to the source of the information, and try to contrast it.
• Get great at tooling so that you can try fast and decide if you want to equip it on your swiss knife or you want to reject instead (I rejected TOON over JSON and I am still sleeping good at nights)
• Use AI for your benefit, and talk about blog posts or hot takes you found on social networks.
• Learn by doing; don't acquire the opinion of someone that claimed to have tried the newest next thing, but you do instead. The outcome is organic and more productive.

Filtering information was always the key.

But, how? Well, this is not so trivial, and this is not a new problem. But there are few recipes to me that seems to work:

1. Use Openclaw to give you a weekly AI digest of AI news (I subscribed to RSS feeds of blogs from top picks by Hackernews users). The quality is good, you get up to date quickly, and you are only 1 week behind (not bad, huh?)
2. Forget Linkedin, it is the echo chamber of the AI news that comes from X. If you want to go minimalistic and zen with social networks, I recommend you to go to X, and follow the accounts that are actually producing. Andrej Karpathy is a great start, but I of course started following Peter Steinberger, Omar Khattab, Drew Breunig, and so others.
3. The Pragmatic Engineer podcast to me is very high quality content; the guests are just so on point, and to me it seems almost illegal that you can watch it for free on Youtube.

To me, these 3 things almost reduce 80% of the noise, so now my vision is clear of what's happening. It is a good start, and from the perspective of a Software AI Engineer, this gives enough clearance to be able to get your own opinion on what's happening.

Enjoy the ride and have fun missing out things.

In a world where we are constantly getting dopamine, and forcing us to do things now or never, I recommend you to sit back, wait some bit and try to focus on what you are interested, and enjoy tinkering with the new tools, packages, libraries, frameworks, and apps.

Right now, I don't have a choice; I use Codex because it plans so good, Claude Code because big refactorings work when you know what to do, Pi because it is so lightweight (and the autoresearcher plugin is chef's kiss), Opencode because why not... even Copilot CLI. All of them have pros and cons, good and bad. I try to get the most of them, I try to compare them, I try to adapt them to my style, and try create tooling around them for my team.

Power is nothing without control, so have control of what you want to know. Don't let others influence you about how you have to do things, but the opposite; force the tools you have to work and do what (and how) you want. Period.

You'll live better. Trust me. And don't Fear Of Missing Out, but enjoy instead; there is a sweet signal between all the bitter noise around AI. And there are pretty great things being done there. Learn from them so that you can create the next big thing.