Meta Engineer on AI: Keep Up, Don't Let It Think for You

For Meta software engineer Rohan Kulkarni, keeping up with AI no longer ends when the workday does.

At work, he said AI has sped up brainstorming and prototyping. Outside the office, he treats it as a discipline, not a crutch. The biggest mistake, he said, is letting the tool do the thinking.

"You have to stay curious," Kulkarni said. "But if you outsource the reasoning, you lose the skill."

He cut back on YouTube and Netflix to free time for reading research papers and experimenting with new models. The goal is to understand the underlying mechanics, not just the outputs.

Kulkarni said the field moves fast enough that a six-month gap in hands-on work leaves an engineer behind. He recommended building small projects with each new release, even if they never ship.

"The reps matter more than the result," he said.