Compounding Craft: Future-Proofing Your Tech Skills in the Age of AI

I’m laying out my philosophy for not just surviving, but thriving, in a tech world obsessed with fleeting trends and rapid skill obsolescence, a problem now amplified by AI. It’s about rejecting the typical career path of burning out on short-lived passions and instead, investing in foundational, “old-school” tools like Linux, Python, vim, git, and Nix (my LPvgn stack). I believe that by focusing on these enduring technologies and embracing a mindset of small, compounding wins, we can achieve a form of craftsmanship and build skills that last, all while maintaining our personal agency and even leveraging AI on our own terms, which is what I’m trying to embody with my Pipulate project.

By Mike Levin

Thursday, May 15, 2025

The Quest for Enduring Skills in an Ephemeral Tech World

This article explores a common frustration for people working in technology: the incredibly fast pace at which skills and software tools become outdated. Imagine spending years mastering a specific programming language or platform, only to find it’s no longer in demand or has been replaced by something entirely new just a few years later. This “tech churn” can be disheartening, especially for those who are passionate about the craft of building software. The author discusses this challenge, particularly how the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be speeding up this cycle of obsolescence.

The core idea presented is a strategy to “future-proof” one’s career by focusing on foundational, often open-source, technologies that have stood the test of time, rather than constantly chasing the newest, shiniest tools. It’s about building a solid base of skills that are less likely to disappear, allowing for deeper mastery and a more sustainable, fulfilling career, akin to how a craftsperson hones their skills with timeless tools. The author also emphasizes the importance of continuous small improvements and personal agency in navigating this ever-changing landscape.

The Accelerating Pace of Tech Obsolescence

This article is about nonstop, successive little refinements — wins that stack upon each other until you’re sitting on top of a big pile of win. This principle is usually applied towards compounding interest with saving money, but it also applies to investing in your skills and feeding your soul. Musicians and artists come to mind, those who do what they do for the love of it. Folks like me get attracted to fields in technology with that same soul-feeding feeling. Star Trek and all. But the disillusionment sets in quickly because the actual tools of the trade change so quickly in tech. If we’re lucky our skills only go obsolete in 5 to 10 year cycles. Now with the emergence of AI it feels like the pace of rapid obsolescence is only accelerating. Here I show you how we stem that tide and future-proof ourselves.

Is Craftsmanship Possible in Software?

All my life I have had the giant red reset button of tech press on me. This is not unexpected, it is just the nature of technology. Yet at the same time, it is not necessarily a truism. That feeling you get from woodworking, textiles, ceramics, music and all those human experiences deeply rooted in tradition and require a significant investment of time to master the skills and knowledge necessary to produce high-quality, often bespoke, items. Apps and programs are exactly such items, but one will hardly become an heirloom. The emphasis with craft is on the hand of the maker, attention to detail, and the enduring quality of the finished product. But in tech there’s a new framework version every year breaking all your code. And massive shifts that obsolete everything you know happen every 5 to 10 years. Is craftsmanship possible in tech? Is longevity of relevant skills and know-how really possible? Can apps endure for ages?

Rejecting the Tech Career Hamster Wheel

Usually the answer is no. Stuff goes obsolete sufficiently quick that if you’re in some field for the love of it, you had better squeeze that lemon in the first 10 years of your career, be ready to switch to something else for the 2nd 10 years, and have your transition to management ready where you totally give up that love for the craft in favor of stability and making room for the younger generation. In other words cram the love into a compressed time-period, make your fortune, get promoted to management and make room for the next fresh new generation who hasn’t yet gone through the obsolescence and disillusionment cycle yet. This is the way of tech… NOT! Not for me, at least. I fell in love with the sort of magic spells you can weave and cast in tech and just because quarterly revenue reports love tech-churn and you getting caught up on the hamster wheel doesn’t mean you have to stay on it.

The Allure and Trap of Shiny New Toys

You can buck the trend of rapid obsolescence in tech if you just take up skills that inherently resist that obsolescence. The rub is that when you try to take up tools that resist obsolescence, they tend to be ones where the popular crowd will turn you away from because those tools feel old and also have a steeper learning curve than the shiny new toys. Shiny new toys make companies money! Shiny new proprietary products are usually easier to use but go obsolete sooner. But they are so, so sexy! Trends and fads drive the economic machine. Nobody’s interested in you having long-term skills and obsolescence resistance but you. Nobody makes money off of you using the free and open source fundamental fabric of tech that seems complicated, passé and out of vogue. But that stuff rules.

The Power of Foundational, Open-Source Tools

And so we’ve got to package the old school tools in new ways to make them appear sexy. We need to not let the popular crowd keep you from seeing the preponderance of evidence that Linux, Python, vim and git are really what everything else is built on. We need to start letting you boostrap and kickstart projects in little approachable ways that uses this oldschool fundamental tech and start building on little wins. We avoid boiling the ocean. We avoid biting off more than we can chew. We pair down our ambition and focus on some tiny baby-step win that is realistically possible. Bank a small win up-front as soon as possible and create that dopamine neurochemical surge that crates positive reinforcement and builds momentum. Commit it. Create a checkpoint. Make it a learning moment. Plan the next step.

Iterative refinements makes a never-ending upward spiral of progress. While it is true there is always the argument that you got things wrong on your first pass and it’s always good to do a rewrite after you know better, this only takes you so far before it switches from a learning experience to destructive. The expression goes you have to do something 3 times to get it right: once to know what you don’t know. Twice to get a lot of things better the second time. And third to really nail it. However, that only works if your workshop is full of the same tools each time. When the very world of tools is swirling and changing around you, your muscle memory never gets a chance to master the tools and you’re excessively reset to beginner. SOME advancement needs to happen.

The Optimal Stopping Distance for Skill Acquisition

It is a similar algorithmic question in life as optimum stopping distance which asks questions like if you’re looking for your next place to live and you find something that seems good enough, should you keep looking and risk loosing the first opportunity, or should you lock it in right away or keep looking for the perfect match? Studies show you should probably go about 20% to 30% of the full 100% of the time/effort you were willing to go if you find a good enough match. That’s the optimal stopping distance. Anything more would be a waste. Anything less would miss too much opportunity.

On this note, you want to lock in on the tech that will serve you for the rest of your life early enough in life so that you can get that compounding returns effect. You want to learn all the tools in your tool shop and start to master them the way a musician does their instrument. You want to get the ball rolling. Explore different tech and tools for the first 30% of your career — and while you’ve obviously still got to learn and wrap-in new things, master the core tools that will serve you the rest of your life. Learn to slam text around almost telepathically with either vim or emacs. Sorry folks, the two original editors of the text editor wars are still king. VSCode/Cursor is nice but where are they going to be in another 10 or 20 years?

My Journey to Embracing Enduring Tech

Even though I held Fred Fish public domain disk #591 in my hands in 1991 when vim made its first big public appearance, I didn’t take it up soon enough. It was only many years later in my career when I truly realized the significance of the vi/vim text editor in my quest to future-proof myself that I took it up with sincerity and got over that learning curve. I’m 15 years into it, typing this article in vim right now, and still getting over that initial learning curve. Don’t get me wrong. It could be worse. It could be emacs. But no really, I kid. Notice what “mode” VSCode and every other editor worth their salt builds in. It’s vim-emulation mode. There’s a reason for that.

Introducing the LPvgn Stack: Linux, Python, Vim, Git, and Nix

Similarly Linux, Python and git fall into this category, collectively creating the LPvg minimal short tech stack platform I like to talk about. But fear not, you don’t need to give up your Macs or Windows systems because a sort of universal normalized Linux (Nix) now runs out of a subdirectory of your Mac or Windows/WSL systems, adding an “n” to the short stack acronym: LPvgn! It took me decades to cobble all this together into a single unified viable plan and package to resist obsolescence. But there it is: Linux, Python, vim, git and nix. And I’m not super-stringent on it. I’ve just got a particular magic cocktail mix that works for me and am happy to share the formula.

Pipulate: Applying the Philosophy in the Age of AI

But now that I have it, it’s time to work on those projects and to bank those tiny incremental compounding wins, and to validate the entire thing by turning it into a giant pile of win. That’s what I’m doing with this Pipulate project, calibrating it very carefully in the age of AI, both to take advantage of local AI baked into the system and the giant most intelligent frontier models of AI that have to be used as cloud services. It’s like I’m solving simultaneous equations balancing all these factors of old-school future-proofing, being slick and relevant enough for tomorrow’s world, and producing something of great utility and potentially broad appeal and interest today.

The Critical Role of Personal Agency

I have a lot of time to make up for not having found my way to LPvgn sooner, but now that I have, I am knee-deep in my magnum opus project where I use it. I am deeply involved in a series of deeply focused nose-to-the-grindstone sprints from which I am trying to emerge from soon without having burnt out, with tales to tell and all the fodder for the book written in the process. And if I play my AI cards right, the book will quite literally write itself… first one way, then the next, and so on until perfectly optimized. Craft, my friends! Heirloom software and systems!

Breaking Free from the Excuse Cycle

I think a lot of us externalize excuses in our lives. If only this… If things just happened this other way… I’m full of potential except for the fact… you know, the same old story. We make our own destinies and if we don’t like the one that we find ourselves in, we modify our stories to protect our self images. There’s infinite reasons to blame outside forces for why the situation isn’t what we want it to be, but only one reason it might become what we wanted to be: exercising our own agency.

Using AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement for Thought

Writing such as this is exactly such an exercise in agency. It’s so funny that these very writing exercises are what lazy bumpkins want to outsource to the AIs! Right? I mean I might use them to clean up my writing or as a sounding wall, or even to do research — but never to generate the ideas in the first place. That is the total opposite of having personal agency. That’s the ultimate expression of having yielded one’s own inner self over to external forces that corral, wrangle and coerce you. Carve out a space for your own inner mind. Preserve the ability to drudge it all up when you need to without being told what you should think.

We start typing. Our guts and emotions and instincts bring us one direction. Our rational mind is allowed to have oversight and kicks-in to make this modification or that directional tweak. We steer our writing and thereby steer our destinies. This is no joke if we actually base our actions on our processed and deliberated over writings. This is not whimsy. This is life-steering.

Overcoming Our Evolutionary Programming

Overriding the currents, eddies and tides of life is not only overcoming our circumstances but is also overcoming our more base animistic lower-brain functions evolved into us because our rational brains aren’t fast enough to save our lives in every condition — our lizard-brains and our worm-brains such as they are. Agency is setting sail and taking command over all that.

Here’s a breakdown of the key points and themes in the article:

The Core Problem: Rapid Obsolescence in Tech

The author highlights a central challenge in the technology field: the rapid pace at which skills and tools become obsolete. This creates a cycle of learning, obsolescence, and disillusionment, often forcing tech professionals to:

Squeeze their passion for the craft into the early years of their career.
Switch to new fields or technologies every 5-10 years.
Transition into management for stability, sacrificing their love for hands-on work.
Feel like they are on a “hamster wheel” of constant, often company-driven, tech churn.
The emergence of AI is perceived as accelerating this obsolescence.

The Author’s Proposed Solution: Resisting Obsolescence through Foundational, “Old-School” Tech

The author argues that it’s possible to “buck the trend” by investing in skills and tools that are inherently resistant to obsolescence. These often include:

Fundamental, open-source technologies: The author champions Linux, Python, vim, and git (LPvg) as the core fabric upon which much of modern tech is built.
Nix: This is added to the stack (LPvgn) as a way to create a universal, normalized Linux environment across different operating systems (Mac, Windows/WSL).
Steeper learning curve, but long-term payoff: These tools might seem “old” or have a higher barrier to entry compared to shiny, new, proprietary products, but they offer enduring value and mastery.
Focus on craftsmanship and longevity: The author draws a parallel to traditional crafts (woodworking, music) where mastery of tools and enduring quality are paramount, suggesting this is achievable in tech.

The Strategy: Nonstop, Successive Little Refinements (Compounding Wins)

Inspired by the principle of compounding interest, the author advocates for:

Small, incremental wins: Focusing on tiny, achievable baby steps to build momentum and positive reinforcement (dopamine surge).
Iterative refinement: Continuously improving and building upon previous successes, creating an “upward spiral of progress.”
Avoiding “boiling the ocean”: Not trying to learn everything at once or taking on overly ambitious projects initially.
Committing and checkpointing: Solidifying learning and progress at each step.

The “Optimal Stopping Distance” in Skill Acquisition

The author applies the concept of “optimal stopping distance” to career development:

Explore for the first ~30% of your career: Experiment with different technologies.
Lock in on core, life-long tools: After the exploratory phase, commit to mastering foundational tools that will provide compounding returns over time, much like a musician masters an instrument.

The Author’s Personal Journey and “Magnum Opus”

The author admits to not taking up vim early enough but is now a dedicated user.
The LPvgn stack is their “magic cocktail mix” for resisting obsolescence.
They are currently applying this philosophy to their “Pipulate project,” aiming to balance old-school future-proofing with modern relevance (including local and cloud AI).

The Importance of Personal Agency

A strong theme towards the end of the article is the power of personal agency:

Rejecting external excuses: We make our own destinies rather than blaming outside forces.
Steering your life through deliberate action: Writing, for example, is presented as an exercise in agency, a way to process thoughts and steer one’s path.
Resisting outsourcing core thinking to AI: While AI can be a tool for cleanup or research, generating original ideas should remain a personal endeavor to maintain agency and preserve one’s inner mind.
Overcoming base instincts: Agency involves using our rational minds to override more primitive brain functions and take command of our direction.

Craftsmanship and “Heirloom Software”

The author poses the question of whether craftsmanship and enduring “heirloom” quality are possible for software. They believe that by focusing on foundational tools and iterative refinement, this ideal can be pursued, even in a rapidly changing field.

In essence, the article is a call to action for tech professionals to take control of their skill development by investing in timeless, foundational technologies and embracing a mindset of continuous, incremental improvement, thereby fostering both long-term relevance and a deeper sense of craftsmanship and personal agency.

AI Analysis

Title/Headline Ideas & Filenames:

Title: Compounding Craft: Future-Proofing Your Tech Skills in the Age of AI Filename: compounding-craft-future-proof-tech-skills-ai.md
Title: Beyond the Hype Cycle: Building Enduring Value with Foundational Tech Filename: beyond-hype-cycle-enduring-value-foundational-tech.md
Title: The LPvgn Stack: A Personal Blueprint for Resisting Tech Obsolescence Filename: lpvgn-stack-resisting-tech-obsolescence.md
Title: Artisan In Code: Why “Old-School” Tech and Incremental Wins Are Your Best Bet Filename: artisan-code-oldschool-tech-incremental-wins.md
Title: Steering Your Tech Destiny: Agency, Foundational Skills, and the AI Revolution Filename: steering-tech-destiny-agency-foundational-skills-ai.md

Strengths (for Future Book):

Relatable Core Problem: Addresses a widespread anxiety (skill obsolescence) in the tech industry.
Strong Authorial Voice & Passion: The first-person narrative is engaging and conveys genuine conviction.
Actionable Philosophy: The concepts of “compounding wins” and focusing on foundational tools (LPvgn) offer a clear, albeit opinionated, path forward.
Specific Tool Recommendations: Mentioning Linux, Python, vim, git, and Nix provides concrete starting points for readers.
Timely AI Integration: Acknowledges and attempts to integrate the current AI wave into the philosophy.
Emphasis on Agency: The call for personal responsibility and deliberate skill-building is empowering.
“Heirloom Software” Concept: Provides an aspirational goal for tech craftsmanship.

Weaknesses (for Future Book):

Niche Toolset Focus: While strong, the LPvgn stack is specific. The book would need to address how the philosophy applies even if readers choose slightly different foundational tools, or provide more rationale for these specific ones over other long-standing alternatives.
Potential “Old Man Yells at Cloud” Tone: Parts could be perceived as resistant to new developments if not framed carefully. The balance between “old-school” and “relevant for tomorrow” needs to be consistently demonstrated.
Steep Learning Curve of Recommended Tools: While acknowledged, the book would need practical strategies/resources for overcoming the initial hurdles of tools like vim or Nix for a broader audience.
Generalization Needed: The “Pipulate project” is a personal example; the book would benefit from more diverse case studies or more generalized applications of the principles.
AI Integration Specificity: The current text mentions “local AI baked into the system” and “frontier models”; more detail or illustrative examples would be needed in a book format to make this concrete for readers.
“Book will write itself” comment: While perhaps a turn of phrase, this might need careful framing in a book about craftsmanship and agency to avoid misinterpretation.

AI Opinion (on Value for Future Book):

This journal entry is highly valuable as raw material for a tech book. It captures a passionate, opinionated, and insightful perspective on a critical issue in tech careers. The author’s personal journey and the development of the LPvgn philosophy provide a strong narrative thread. The core arguments for foundational skills, iterative improvement, and personal agency are compelling.

However, to become a successful book, the content will require significant structuring, editing for a broader audience (toning down some of the more informal or rant-like elements), and expansion with more detailed explanations, examples, and potentially counter-arguments or alternative perspectives. The inherent “journal” nature means it’s a rich vein of thought and experience, but it’s not yet a polished chapter. Its strength lies in its authenticity and the clear articulation of a survival and growth strategy.