If you a) know what you are doing and b) know what an llm is capable of doing, c) can manage multiple llm agents at a time, you can be unbelievably productive. Those skills I think are less common than people assume.

You need to be technical, have good communication skills, have big picture vision, be organized, etc. If you are a staff level engineer, you basically feel like you don’t need anyone else.

OTOH i have been seeing even fairly technical engineering managers struggle because they can’t get the LLMs to execute because they don’t know how to ask it what to do.