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farhanhelmycode

To Play Short Versus The Long Game

• 3 min • 551 words
ai career learn research

Honestly I’m in alot of confusion and self-doubt currently. After countless of hours thinking about the future of my career in this AI era, it came down to two career path. To play the long game or short game, let’s talk about it.

The Short Game

Short game is all fun and hype, I see alot of people are playing the short game, build dozens of product, ui, landing page, SaaS. Utilizing 100% the capabilities of generative AI by building and finishing those side projects that never been finish. All of them hoping to make money of course, and it makes me think, do I wanna go down this path?

Actually I’ve been there, building my product reinvoiz.com by vibe coding 100% and it is alot of fun honestly, I learn alot. But, after awhile I saw 2-3 people trying to ship the same thing. I was like, what’s the point? Everyone can build product now, do I wanna become like many, how do I even standout in this situation? It maybe will become absolute anyways (maybe I am naive and never really been to the ground so much meeting non tech people).

Honestly it has become boring at this point seeing AI generated product and vibe coded SaaS, I wanna build something different. But, I still don’t know what it is until I sort of figure out the long game

The Long Game

Long game is not an easy route, this whole AI thing is still new, everyday we see different model, more improvements, new ways to implement things. To play the long game we need to go deep down to another level, don’t build wrappers -> ochestrate bunch of agents instead. Don’t build another chatbot -> figure out how to fine tune open source LLM model instead. Don’t build another PDF as a knowledge base -> research and build new RAG method instead.

Why I call this a long game? Because it requires deeper knowledge that even LLM couldn’t figure out what you are trying to do. I think this is where I can standout for my career. But, these type of stuff requires alot of time, it can consume alot of ur time and even worse, people in Silicon Valley / China could ship the same exact thing but better. That’s the most scary things, top teams in the whole world are shipping faster than ever. I was thinking if I try to do this solo, I might learn something, maybe some fundamentals, but do standout maybe no.

And that is why my mind keep on going back to short game, maybe combination of both? Learn hard things fast -> build a product around it? I honestly don’t know.

Even these whole AI thing is new, I still felt I haven’t keep up, alot of things to learn maybe slowly.

Which one to choose?

I will still keep on shipping feature, bulding product. But at the same time, extra time that I had everyday I will try to do some model fine tuning, eval, RL and so on. Actually I’ve tried couple of things like, building RAG using LEANN, self host deepseek ocr on my RTX3060 -> what’s next? Keep on trying things and actually build something that is different from all what people are building right now.