Hey Bobby,

I’ve been talking to a lot of developers lately.

Usually, I get the same questions over and over:

What should I build?

What should I put on my portfolio?

How should I study for interviews?

And the honest answer is uncomfortable.

A lot of people are preparing for a version of the tech industry that is fading away.

They’re grinding LeetCode for interview formats that are changing.

They’re optimizing for big tech roles that are not nearly as plentiful as they used to be.

They’re building portfolio projects that would have been impressive in 2020.

Meanwhile, the market has moved.

LinkedIn recently published its top emerging skills in tech. Near the top of the list? RAG. Retrieval Augmented Generation.

You can call it hype. You can call it a fad. You can say it has no "real business use cases."

You can also call it incredibly in demand.

Look at companies like DoorDash, Perplexity, Discord and Disney. Look at early stage startups building internal tooling, search, support copilots, knowledge systems. Almost all of them are looking for engineers who understand how to build AI systems that actually connect to real data.

If it’s a fad, it’s a very well funded one.

I am not in the business of teaching what I think is cool. If that were the case, I'd be launching a program to learn Rust or build side projects.

But who cares what I enjoy?

The mission for Parsty is simple: help people get employed and stay highly employable as software professionals.

That’s why we teach AI development. That’s why we focus on RAG and agents. Not (only) because it’s trendy, but because companies are paying for it.

And no, the future of software is not “just use [this model bro]." Prompting a model to autocomplete your thoughts is not leverage. It’s not rare. It’s not defensible. It’s not what employers pay top dollar for.

Understanding how AI systems work, how to evaluate them, how to ship them into production, and how to tie them to real business value is a different story.

While I'm ranting...

Another thing I’ve noticed when it comes to tech social media: people extrapolate wildly from a single experience.

One person gets a heavy DSA interview and suddenly "every interview is pure algorithms."

Someone builds a weak RAG demo at work and concludes "AI is useless."

Instead of inheriting opinions - look at data. Read reports. Do basic keyword searches on job boards. See what companies are actually asking for. 

In 2026, the edge is not just technical skill. It’s the ability to see where the market is going before everyone else updates their roadmap.

If you want to build that skill set with me:

I’m hosting a live AI Agents workshop this Thursday where we'll build an agent using a popular pattern.

btw... You don’t have to agree with me.

But if your goal is to get hired, or be hard to replace, you should at least be paying attention to where the demand is clearly moving.

Stay optimistic! Stay skeptical!

- Brian