My advice? Focus on the business value, not the next ticket. Understand what the actual added value of your work is to your employer. It won’t help in the day-to-day tasks but it will help you navigate your career with confidence.

Personally - and I realize this is not generalizable advice - I don’t consider myself a SWE but a domain expert who happens to apply code to all of his tasks.

I’ve been intentionally focusing on a specific niche - computer graphics, CAD and computational geometry. For me writing software is part of the necessary investment to render something, model something or convert something from domain to domain.

The fun parts are really fun, but the boring parts are mega-boring. I’m actually eagerly awaiting for LLM:s to reach some level of human parity because there simply isn’t enough talent in my domains to do all the things that would be worthwhile to do (cost and return of investment, right).

The reason is my domain is so niche you can’t webscrape&label to reach the intuition and experience of two decades, working in various industries from graphics benchmarking, automotive HUDs, to industrial mission critical AEC workflows and to realtime maps.

There is enough knowledge to train LLMs to get a hint as soon as I tie few concepts together, and then they fly. The code they write at the moment apart from simple subroutines is not good enough to act as unsupervised assistant … most of the code is useless honestly. But I’m optimistic and hope they will improve.