I don't personally know of any software engineers using AI as "fleets of agents" in a "factory." Sounds like a nightmare.
Yeah, I very much dispute the characterization GP made as to how software devs are working. I know some are. But I do not believe it's the majority of people in the field, not by a long shot.
Every PR now has auto reviews. That's like at least 3-5+ agents depending on the repo.
I usually have a high-level agent drafting plans, then spawning sub-agents to build parts of the plan, other sub-agents to check the work of those agents. Then the PRs have different code review agents looking at the code, on top of the agents for people on my team also reviewing my code.
And I'm probably on the more amateurish end of AI development. As I learned these techniques from YouTube.
When you hear about the work Anthropic researchers are doing, they seem to be using hundreds or thousands of agents to solve problems.