Lately, it feels impossible to avoid conversations about AI.
It’s everywhere.
AI models. AI assistants. Agentic AI. AI tools.
Every day there seems to be a new product, a new framework, or a new prediction about how AI is going to change everything.
As someone who spent most of his career working in enterprise environments, I honestly don’t know where I fully stand yet.
What I do know is this:
I have very little real-world experience working with AI professionally.
And until recently, my interaction with tools like ChatGPT was mostly casual. Asking random questions. Trying prompts that other people shared online. Using it as an alternative to Google when I wanted answers without having to phrase things properly.
That was about it.
The more I prepare myself for whatever comes next, the more impossible AI becomes to ignore.
It seems like some level of AI experience is quickly becoming a desirable skill for software engineering roles.
Then an interesting idea hit me.
What if I let ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot experience the layoff on my behalf?
Not literally, of course.
But what if I created a persona that closely resembles me:
- my background
- my career history
- my interests
- my strengths
- my limitations
- and my current situation
and asked them how they would spend their time trying to find a new job?
The more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became.
Sure, I could spend months trying to understand every AI concept from the ground up before doing anything practical. And maybe one day I’ll get there.
But right now, spending months or years trying to understand every corner of AI before taking action isn’t really an option. My bank account would most definitely reject the idea.
There is just an endless amount of information to consume. LLMs. Agents. Memory systems. MCP. RAG. Fine-tuning. Open-source models. Cloud platforms…
Every time I learn one thing, it seems like there are five more things I discover that I don’t understand yet.
So instead of waiting until I feel qualified to start, I figured I might as well learn by experiencing them firsthand.
The goal isn’t to replace my own job search or somehow automate my life away.
I’m simply curious.
How useful is AI when given a real-world problem?
Can different AI assistants arrive at different conclusions?
Will they suggest things I haven’t considered?
Will they recommend unrealistic plans that only work if someone has unlimited time and energy?
Or will they provide genuinely useful advice that helps me navigate a difficult situation?
To keep things realistic, I’m planning to give them constraints that reflect real life.
Limited time
Limited energy
Knowledge gaps
The possibility of spending time learning something that ultimately turns out not to be useful
In other words, they’ll have to operate under many of the same limitations that I do.
I’ll be asking AI assistants the same questions and comparing their recommendations against reality. I’ll also ask them to review and revise their own plans periodically so they don’t just continue going forward without reflecting on whether their approach is actually working or not.
I’m not looking to determine which AI is “the smartest,” nor to crown a winner.
What I want to see is what happens when AI advice collides with real life.
Because unlike them, I can’t study 24 hours a day. I can’t absorb new technologies in a blink of an eye. And I can’t completely put life on hold while I challenge myself.
I have a wife
A two-year-old daughter
Bills to pay
Responsibilities that don’t disappear just because I’m between jobs.
If any of them points me toward useful skills, useful learning resources, or a better way to improve myself, then I’ll consider the experiment worthwhile.
At the same time, I want this blog to serve another purpose.
I plan to use this website as a personal study log to track my own progress and any personal or professional events I encounter along the way.
I’m not naturally expressive when it comes to communication. I tend to keep thoughts in my head instead of writing them down or talking about them. Sometimes good ideas disappear simply because I never took the time to capture them.
So this feels like a useful exercise beyond career development.
Maybe it will help me think more clearly.
Maybe it will help me communicate better during interviews.
Maybe it will become something my future self looks back on one day.
Or maybe this entire blog just quietly dies in three weeks and becomes digital evidence of a mild mid-career existential crisis. Who knows?
For now, I’m just trying to move forward one step at a time.
What I can tell is that this won’t be an AI guru journey.
It definitely won’t be a productivity challenge where I wake up at 5 a.m. every day and become a machine learning expert by next Thursday.
It’s just going to be an honest record of:
what I study
what I struggle with
what stresses me out
what interviews go badly
what advice actually helps
and how my thinking changes over time
No grand reinvention story yet.
No dramatic comeback yet.
No “Top 10 AI Tools That Changed My Life.” Definitely not.
Just a laid off guy trying to figure things out in real time while the rest of the world keeps going.
