Many are still in denial that you can do work that is as good as before, quicker, using coding agents. A lot of people think there has to be some catch, but there really doesn’t have to be. If you continue to put effort in, reviewing results, caring about testing and architecture, working to understand your codebase, then you can do better work. You can think through more edge cases, run more experiments, and iterate faster to a better end result.
So I think LLMs have moved the effort that used to be spent on fun part (coding) into the boring part (assessment and evaluation) that is also now a lot bigger..
You can also setup way more elaborate verification systems. Don't just do a static analyis of the code, but actually deploy it and let the LLM hammer at it with all kinds of creative paths. Then let it debug why it's broken. It's relentless at debugging - I've found issues in external tools I normally would've let go (maybe created an issue for), that I can now debug and even propose a fix for, without much effort from my side.
So yeah, I agree that the boring part has become the more important part right now (speccing well and letting it build what you want is pretty much solved), but let's then automate that. Because if anything, that's what I love about this job: I get to automate work, so that my users (often myself) can be lazy and focus on stuff that's more valuable/enjoyable/satisfying.
But specifically to your examples, the latter: I think the "brute force the program" approach will be more common that doing things manually in many cases (not all! I'm still a believer in people!).
Edit: Well, I wrote a bad blog post on this some time ago, I might as well share it: I think the accepting means engaging with the change rather than ignoring it.
https://riffraff.info/2026/03/my-2c-on-the-ai-genai-llm-bubb...
Once the tools outperform humans at the tasks to which they were applied (and they will), you don't need to be involved at all, except to give direction and final acceptance. The tools will write, and verify, the code at each step.
I don't get why some people are so convinced that this is inevitable. It's possible, yes, but it very well might be the case, that models cannot be stopped from randomly doing stupid things, cannot be made more trustworthy, cannot be made more verifiable, and will have to be relegated to the role of brainstorming aids.
Someone once said that It is hard to make a man understand things if their profit depends on them not understanding it...