> But they could slot straight back in, it's like riding a bike.

Yeah, not quite. There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.

9 months ago I was comparing it to running a dev team, but now it has changed and there are practices and processes that are unique to managing agents.

e.g. a team of software devs have the self-awareness to not take a single marginally-relevant point in a spec document and spend 20% of their team effort to build an entire subsystem to meet it without checking. The process and rituals that we used to use to make sure that a software dev team was making progress and would hit the project deadline are now largely useless, but we need new ones to make sure the agents are not heading off into unnecessary rabbit holes.

I'm not saying those ex-seniors would not be able to get back in the saddle. I'm just saying there's been more change in the last 9 months than there has in the last 30 years, so it may take a period of adjustment.

But I don't think the things that burned them out before will have changed. Dealing with non-tech executives was always the worst part of the job, and LLMs can't help with that, and are even making it worse ("ChatGPT says this should only take a couple a hours and you're using Typescript instead of Go! Why? Fix it!").

The "a ton to learn about how to control an LLM" is remarkably similar to learning how to work with a new team of humans, perhaps easier. LLMs though eccentric are far more predictable than most humans.

> There's a ton to learn about how to control an LLM while it's writing code, and even more to learn about how to manage a set of agents.

So? The experts have a only few months of experience anyway, gained the slow way (via experimentation). It's not like someone can't pick up those skills in a week.