Software engineer Rohan Kulkarni at Meta spends four to six hours a week outside the office keeping up with AI, paying roughly $50 a month across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity subscriptions. He is one of many tech professionals who spend their own time on AI to develop side projects, acquire skills, or not fall behind. At work, AI has reduced the time needed for certain projects from around one month to just two or three weeks. Kulkarni developed a habit of teaching himself new technologies via side projects before generative AI existed. He initially let AI solve everything but now comes up with his own solutions first and validates them with AI. These additional hours have not come at the expense of anything important, as he wastes less time on YouTube Shorts and passive watching. He noted that approaching oneself as an architect instead of a hands-on worker involves another level of thinking, which can be a reason for peers' AI fatigue. Kulkarni builds from what he knows rather than following every new technology, focusing on issues faced by actual people.