Between 2023 and late 2024, I hired around 40 technical profiles: developers, QAs, architects, leads. Then, hiring paused. AI was reshaping everything, and in tech time, 18 months off might as well be a generation.
Coming back to interviews, what struck me was how little had changed for many. I met candidates with 10, 15, even 20 years of experience. Senior titles, respected companies, deep expertise. But when conversations turned to AI, things got quiet. We heard generic buzzwords floating around LinkedIn, occasional mentions of Cursor, Copilot, or a Claude.md file, but not much real understanding.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)? Unheard of. Agent frameworks? Out of scope.
And these were not junior engineers. They came from major banks, consultancies, and large software houses. Which made the pattern clearer: it's not about skill, it's about exposure. Somewhere in the past 18 months, a frontier emerged: builders experimenting with AI-infused stacks, rethinking architectures, and shipping at 10× the speed, while professionals still follow traditional workflows. Both groups are smart. Only one is moving with the current.
This isn't criticism but rather reflection. Technology always outpaces institutions, and AI just widened that gap. Teams experimenting with agents and retraining models aren't inherently better; they're simply closer to the edge where learning never stops.
At madewithlove, this edge is our habit. Through blog posts, internal knowledge sharing, and constant experimentation, we turn new practices into everyday standards, for our own teams and our customers. It's not trend-chasing; it's keeping pace with reality.
Maybe that's what hiring should measure next: not years of experience, but evidence of curiosity. Because in this era, redundancy isn't about age or title. It's about whether you stayed connected while the frontier moved.
