I think you’re heavily miscalibrated. Anyone can use LLMs, the floor has risen drastically. What supposed productivity you achieve, every one else can because there’s 0 skill to using LLMs, this is probably a much darker future ahead for you than the rest, you’ll have to keep constantly agent maxing to try and outcompete millions of other humans doing the same.

Analogy time!

Anyone can do work on their own car. It's not especially hard.

But a professional working on their own car knows tricks and has tools / ways of working that a regular person doesn't have access to.

You can tell the difference in the result if you know where to look.

Sometimes it matters: the way you change some components matters - and while you're there with half the engine bay cleared, you can fix a few other things that usually fail in this specific model.

Sometimes it doesn't: oil change is hard to fuck up, but not impossible.

The the things I've made with agents aren't hard to do for anyone, but I can claim that I can pick up any of my projects 6 months from now and confidently add features without worrying about stuff breaking or the agent doing crazy crap - because I build the limits into my projects by default.

> agent maxing

If not all agents are equal and require calibration, then it seems like people can specialize, so you're only competing with other specialists in that area (and not necessarily trying to out-compete).

I'm not sure this is credible. Using AI very much seems to be a skill with its own craft and best-practices. I could imagine a similar argument was made by painters about photographers. Yet, we believe good photography takes skill.

LLMs are constantly driving off the cliff. Constantly. They require some actual agency steering the ship.

This idea that there is 0 skill to using them is the opposite: it requires far more skill because the human has to manage the whole building all at once rather than focusing on putting up one beam at a time, one rafter at a time. Your responsibility is totally different. It has to scale far higher!

Many devs have had strong leads that do the ticket work, that figure out what to do. It's unclear what role there is for those folks now.

lol wat? there is a very clear gap in output between what a good swe can produce with ai versus a bad one, let alone a random person who doesn't even know what javascript is.