Short answer: RAG, with strong prompt skills as the base. Full agent dev is the high-skill ceiling — worth pursuing once you have shipped one production-grade RAG system.
Why this order.
- Prompting is table-stakes — every dev needs it.
- RAG solves the most common business problem (search over private data) and is in real demand.
- Agents are interesting and over-hyped; production reliability is still maturing.
The exception most miss. Vector DBs, embeddings, and chunking strategy are where most “agent” projects actually live or die. Master the unsexy parts first.
What did you ship in 2025 that taught you the most?
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