been hacking 3 decades so exponentially north of 1,200 hours ... in my career the one trait that always seems to differentiate great SWEs from decent/mediocre/awful ones is laziness.

the best SWEs will automate anything they have to manually do more than once. I have seen this over and over and over again. LLMs have take automation to another level and learning everything they can be helpful with to automate as much of my work will be worth 12,000+ hours in the long run.