My biggest takeaway is that agents/LLMs in general are super helpful when paired together with a human who knows the inside and out of software development, who uses it side-by-side with their normal work.

They start being less useful when you start treating them as "I can send them ill-specified stuff, ignore them for 10 minutes and merge their results", as things spiral out of control. Basically "vibe-coding" as a useful concept doesn't work for projects you need to iterate on, only for things you feel OK with throwing away eventually.

Augmenting the human intellect with LLMs? Usually a increase in productivity. Replacing human coworkers with LLMs? Good luck, have fun.

It does seem pretty clear that an individual who possess super high quality human capital, paired with something like an LLM (provided the LLM is good enough relative to the individual) can be a powerful combination.

The issues are:

1) There isnt enough supply of those individuals 2) Such an LLM of that kind doesnt exist (at least not in consistent nature) 3) The amount invested into what is going on will not yield returns commensurate to the required rate of return

Interestingly enough, I believe Andrej Karpathy is also focusing on education (levelling up the supply of human capital) - I came to the above conclusion about a month ago. And it 'feels' right to me.