6-12 months ago I felt like i was constantly behind the curve with all the different things people were doing to get more out of their claude code. as the year has progressed though, all of those features keep making their way into vanilla claude code, at a faster and faster rate. Now someone working on the bleeding edge is using things that i'll be using without having to think about them a month from now. It has really reduced my anxiety of being left behind.

That's the thing, any "advancement" you might discover will be integrated into main tools soon enough, I am going to say that in fact, you probably shouldn't even learn them before they are integrated. Helps you filter through all the noise and avoid wasting time on learning something that isn't going to take off.

You're discounting the "being able to write properly and put ideas into inteligible text" skill piece here.

Most people who have been programming for a while should have those skills. If they don't then learning AI is not the issue but communication is.

Most good programmers are good at writing. If you’re capable at simultaneously writing instructions for a dumb abstract machine and have those instructions being understandable for humans, you’re clearly good at expressing at least technical ideas.

Yeah, never had a problem with explaining to AI what I want from it. That doesn't mean AI always follows what I tell it to do ...

Which AI are you using?