>How do you get the greatest quantity of maintainable, high quality code within a given token budget?

Doesn't matter as much. The cost of "maintenance" is going down, from what I can see internally, from other companies, and every story i'm reading from other organizations as well. Token budgets are changing, but model quality and effectiveness are going up as well.

> We've also been hearing for years that LLMs are going to automate away software development entirely, but software job postings are steadily rising.

I think this has been contested from day 1. SE jobs might be automated, but jobs might increase, if there's possibility of starting new companies / new investments / etc.