It takes a lot of the grunt-work out of writing something, and it actually is very much like running a team of junior engineers. I tend to run multiple threads at once (compiler, blewit, docs, framework), and often overnight I just give them a bunch of tasks to do, with files (/tmp/compiler, /tmp/blewit, …) to shout on, if they need input from, or have found relevant bugs for, another thread. I come down in the morning and spend the first hour or so just reviewing code.
Or sometimes I come down and discover that one of them has proclaimed “it’s 3am (it wasn’t) and I’m not going to make a change at this hour”. Like, what ? You’re a machine! You don’t get sleepy…