Stage 4 · Lesson 5 of 7
Depth in one area, range around it
A has deep skill in one area (the vertical bar) and working knowledge of several around it (the horizontal bar). Depth makes you the person a team relies on for a hard problem; range lets you move when one area shrinks. Shallow knowledge of many tools is worth less than it was, because an AI assistant now gives everyone some of it.
Choose depth in something durable and close to your work: a domain such as payments or health, performance, security, data, distributed systems or reliability. Then keep range: enough frontend, backend, cloud and AI to work across a product.
Common trapchasing every new framework for range and never going deep enough in anything to be hard to replace.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Prompt Engineering for Software Engineers
Design Gurus · Beginner · Subscription
Use AI assistants well on real engineering tasks, with prompts you can reuse
- CourseFreeClaude Code in Action
Anthropic · Intermediate
A free course on working with a coding agent on a real codebase