My Mental Model for "Is It Worth Automating?" Has Changed

Good reasonable take. I think the tradeoff on AI automation is trading skill development, brain muscle growth, and technical understanding for speed. You have to balance it so you are net faster but also growing. Otherwise you are just indistinguishable from any other prompter.

I’m unconvinced by people specializing in “agentic engineering techniques” like managing agent swarms/spec writing/harness tuning. Regardless of how complex your set up is I don’t think you are actually growing your skillset/problem solving abilities if your only interaction with code is prompting. I also think those “skills” have a finite lifetime as each generation of model and harness requires different ways to hold them.

Eventually if the AI promise is meant to happen (which I’m skeptical), LLMs will be able to fully manage their own swarms/write their own specs without requiring our input. Only spending time learning how to get better results from today’s AI is basically a waste for your long term growth.