Been using LLMs both at work (FinTech DevOps/SRE) and on side projects (big data, games, websites) and here has been my "arc"

- first used copy and paste in and out of Grok

- started using CLI tools e.g. Claude and OpenCode

- move up to using 3 and sometimes 4 agents at the same time

- considered going to the agents managing agents

- have settled on having LLMs build tools that are both deterministic, usable by humans and the agent, and also faster (b/c there is less "back and forth")

Honestly, it feels a LOT like when Kubernetes came out. e.g. you stopped running containers on a box using Docker Compose plus scripts/configs etc. Instead gave a large part of the operation to an "agent" (in this case k8s) that managed all of the details you didn't need to care about anymore.

I've also realized that while the LLMs can crank out code at a very high rate, someone still needs to make sure everything is running, debug issues etc. You could set up agents to monitor what the agents do but then you still end up with someone needing to keep an eye on everything. If anything, you need MORE people b/c now you can just keep spinning up new components etc.

Also, was in a discussion with one of the best developers I've ever worked with. It came down to the following point:

"Programming is rapidly becoming a hobby. Software engineering is becoming more important than ever."