alt Hacker NewsI am talking from the perspective of the individual developer.
You don't need your impressive product to succeed to land a good career.
If Alice is doing LLM-from-scratch work today, and Bob is doing agent harness work today, Bob's project is far more likely than Alice's to become useful/popular/profitable.
But if neither project survives, in 5 years, Alice will be more employable/at a higher market rate than Bob.
Neither one has even gone to college yet. I’d expect Alice’s project to be more likely to interest professors, get some undergrad research experience, maybe that can turn into something.