Feedback loop alone to validate hypothesis, even if you throw away all the code and decide to write by hand is a terrific value proposition.

I believe it’s only possible to truly appreciate that after doing it for a while with trial and error, without external opinions

I agree code produced is a poor measure. And I agree that some of the bigger pieces of coding were everything you mention, coding still did take _some_ amount of time.

Usually in a day I have one agent going on whatever my large, main task is, generally feature work of some sort. Previously this is what most of my sprints would have been filled with.

But now, while that's going I have one or two others simultaneously working on crashes (I do mobile), other bugs, a small refactor, or maybe a small enhancement.

And finally I usually have another where I'm querying analytics or working on higher level questions to try and help guide what we should do next, either from a product or technical perspective.

A single one of these are all sped up by using LLMs but to be able to do several in parallel makes me much more effective than I was before. This is why I believe that those who don't use these tools properly will be left behind.

yes, I agree with what the others have said that amount of code written is not a metric for "engineering skill." However, I do think that once the requirements have been scoped properly, there's no reason for a human to be involved in that stage.

The spec-development & testing phases before and after implementation can and should have human involvement, not the implementation. With that being said, there's so many places for this SDLC to be optimized / made more productive with agents that I think everyone should be using them. How well you use them, now that's another story... (check out the above^^)!

Yes. That is what I usually do. Like old days' unit test. Write a couple of units and test. I never do plan first then let llm automatically code the entire project.