I’ve been annoying my friends with AI for years but one of the more bewildering things has been trying to convince my technical friends to try AI bots and automation. One of the most common arguments I get back is:
“I just lack foundational skills/knowledge in that area”
Ugh.
Stupidity is something I used to excuse (somewhat) before I was a father of teenagers – these days I have near zero tollerance for it. I get it – not everyone has in-depth expertise with Linux, docker, networking, web services, or a dozen programming languages and technologies that are part of even basic apps these days. The point of AI is that you don’t need it to learn and get ahead.
Let me take you back to 8 year old Vlad. My first programming class and I got to learn the magic of the POKE command in Basic in my first computer programming class:
The domain expertise back then involved turning on the TV, going to channel 3 or 4 back and forth and jiggling the cable until the RF signal locked in and you were lucky not to have rolling bars scroll up. Point being, technology was not that rock solid and you had a lot of trial and error involved in getting things to work. Being able to change the color of the screen and the border – that was magic!
Meanwhile in 2026…
We’ve advanced a little. And not just in a sense that you no longer need to remember memory-mapped hardware registers or color codes.
AI IDE, agents, MCP servers, automation workflows and everything I pretty much spent my entire career learning like a caveman is extensively documented and on a skill gap of someone experiencing autocomplete for the first time.
You don’t need to know every little thing about Linux, Codex or Cloud Code can setup the backend for you. You don’t need to know every little thing about security and networking, pentests and development best practices are automated as well.
With every technological advancement in tech we’ve gone from needing to know less and less about the guts and focus more on the outcomes. I’ve gone from memorizing memory locations, to memorizing which files handled network configuration, to barely being able to remember anything. AI came in just the right time.
Point being, don’t let your percieved gap in knowledge of all the components hold you back from building and growing. At no point in tech history did we have the ability to have the tech guide us, teach us, troubleshoot for us, work around problems for us, or help us solve problems. I grew up hearing “you won’t always have a calculator on you” and man were they wrong.
Do your self a favor and mute ignorant people who ramble about AI killing the environment or fantasize about a future without it because “it’s going to become proprietary or expensive“. Not only because none of that is even remotely true (after all, quantized models can run on laptops with mediocre specs and even on $10 esp32 SoC powered by a watch chip)
Sign up for a free VPS. Roll out openclaw or a bot of your choice. Start learning, start building, start growing. The gap in tech these days is less about knowledge and more about perfecting the outcome. We’re in the golden age of free computing – as every AI platform and cloud service provider tries to compete for control of the future they are giving away an insane amount of resources that can help you.
Don’t get obsolted by AI, grow with it instead. It’s a choice you get to make.
P.S. Most of you dinosaurs reading this blog didn’t know jack about DNS, Exchange, IIS, ISA and needed Jeff to write encyclopedia email responses just to guide you through AD. Yet you limped through it just fine with wizards, in 2026 that’s ChatGPT and Codex.