Biggest opportunity now as a software engineer is clear: master parallelism → outsize scale of output. Value creation in software has always come from leverage: small input, outsized output. Parallelism-maxxing is not extremely quantifiable because it's so new. The spectrum runs between people managing a couple of agents on their local machine to those running an infinite number of agents + computers at a time than can be spun up and down on demand. You want to be at the far end of this spectrum, and you should be ROI-maxxing every token spent. If you can do this and prove it, you will have an infinite number of opportunities available. If you're still trying to do this locally you are at an objective disadvantage, equivalent of hosting a startup on a server in your closet vs using AWS. And if you're spending your time building and maintaining infrastructure that gives you no competitive edge, the AWS analogy applies in the question "why are you wasting your time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting instead of building unique customer-facing features?".