As LLMs progress, how do you stay sharp and productive?

I like to generate a variety of personal crises to deal with since now coding agents seem to do most of my job. That keeps me on my toes.

Do more. The LLM is not your replacement, it will help you achieve 10x more. LLM also have quiz mode so just feed it a book and ask to generate questions if you want more.

I just write code.

Not nearly all the code. Maybe 5% - the important code. To keep things sane, explore new areas, get a deeper understanding of the system, delete/simplify agent slop, improve test coverage, or make some other foundational change.

Feels like we’re bending over backwards to avoid just doing this. But it seems for me, at least, the way to have the highest leverage on an agent heavy project, it’s fulfilling, it helps the agent, and it keeps me in flow.

Whenever I am trying to work on a project, I go through it myself first with proper details that what I need to build and all the specifications then tell LLMs the plan so they can code and I can keep my architecture skills intact. For keeping my coding skills intact, for small code changes, I prefer doing them myself, so I don't make myself much dumb.