<< That's not the state of today at all, and probably doesn't represent the near or medium future.

Thank you for saying this. I briefly wondered if my particular company is just way behind or particularly dysfunctional and disorganized ( a possibility for sure ). I do agree with you observation on LLMs effectively lowering entry level skill ( yesterday I was able to dissect xml file despite it not being something I could normally do without any prep work and despite mildly unusual - I thought - formatting choices by vendor ). There was still a fair amount of back and forth for what some enthusiast would call 'perfect prompt' and interesting bugs that had to be addressed, but, having seen the daily mess at my company does not exactly make me a full blown evangelist. I see it more as a get to the wrong answer faster. That is the part that concerns me.