i'm in the same boat, i did the zero-to-hero series karpathy put out to get a basic understanding of what we're dealing with. At work, I helped put together a basic rag setup last year that's in production so feel ok with implementation. Finally, i have a little personal pet project that i'm going to feel out with claude code over Christmas to get more hands on. That's about it all i'm going to do to "keep up". I'll let the fighters fight it out and then just use whatever wins.

btw here's a link to the karpathy videos https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

edit: i use claude and chatgpt day to day to help with simple things like regex, a replacement for google search in same cases, and self contained classes, functions, and other small discreet blocks of code.