The Road to Becoming a Robotics Engineer
            taken from @DeRonin on X, dated 2026-09-02
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Why Robotics and not AI engineering

Everyone in your timeline is an AI engineer now, and that is the 
whole problem. You cannot build a moat out of what a subagent does
at 3am for pennies.

Robotics is the opposite, for reasons that are structural rather
than fashionable:
    - the models already work, what is missing is someone who can
      put them in a body
    - you cannot scrape the physical world, someone has to move a
      real machine to create the data
    - there is no Stack Overflow answer for why your gripper keeps
      slipping
    - a robot falling over is not a problem you can hand to a sub-
      agent
    - nobody clones your robot over a weekend

AI engineering is crowded and robotics is empty.

What a robotics engineer actually does

A lot of people hear "robotics engineer" and imagine someone
designing a humanoid from scratch. In reality the job splits into
specialties, and you pick one and stay literate in the rest:
    - perception and computer vision
    - controls and state estimation
    - motion planning and manipulation
    - robot learning
    - embedded and firmware
    - simulation
    - systems and integration
    - deployment and operations

I read live job listing from Figure and Skild, and the same four
requirements appear in every single one:
    - C++ and Python, both, not one or the other
    - experience on real hardware, since simulation-only does not
      qualify as senior
    - depth in one specialty and literacy across the rest
    - debugging named as a skill in its own right

Notice what is not on that list: a specific degree.

That is why this roadmap is built around making things work rather
than studying theory and why every section below ends with some-
thing you have to build.

Keep whatever is paying you while you do it. Treat this as two or
three hours a day. This is how the six months are designed to be
run.