Hi, I'm the original author and I can clarify a few things.
The 543 hours are the agent compute hours, not me at the keyboard. The pipeline runs autonomously, the agents execute in parallel, and the gates verify the output. Most of the prompts are agent-to-agent, not human-to-agent.
On the timeline: I have a BSCS (1995) and MSCS (1997) with a specialty in distributed systems. I actually worked my way through school doing this work so I didn't need loans. Let's call it almost 35 years.
The terminology has evolved but the architecture hasn't changed as much as people think.