Where I am headed, I think, is to basically be a platform engineer. The job is to create the guardrails, validation, prompt library, and both agent and manual reviews; that keeps the domain experts safe when they start using coding agents.

It's a little bit like being T2/T3 customer support [or support engineer], but internal. You're there to catch the dangerous spots, the weird edge cases, and to make sure that everything is set up correctly, rather than to solve 100% of the routine problems yourself.

There's also plenty of room for cross-cutting-concerns, of course

> I used billions of tokens last month alone.

I use Claude Code (Opus 4.6 at max effort) all day long, and I genuinely don't understand how this is possible. Is that usage paying off?

This is very likely due to my lack of understanding, but... how?

Honestly, this is my experience as well. LLMs make it easier to explore other domains, but they do not make you the master of one; you still need expert domain knowledge.

That said, they do make excellent tools to quickly try out new ideas and dive into them; they can even be great learning accelerators if you have a curious mind.

Domain expertise combined with a QA mindset could replace SWE, but consistent QA mindset is rare

Totally agree.