Honestly I feel the same.

I'm holding out hope that there will always be boutique/edge software to be written, which requires enough design and care to be mentally challenging and engaging - the craftsmanship kind.

When AlphaGo was announced, I had to keep telling people that "It's not like computers win at Go, it's just that we now have a tool that makes us way better at Go". If an alien race showed up and challenged us to Go to save the species, would we use a Go player or a AlphaGo, if we had to choose?

The problem is LLMs aren't like that, because software isn't like Go. And, they really are annoying to use, frustrating to redirect all the time, and generally cannot do what you want precisely, without putting in more mental energy to provide context and decompose further than you'd need to do the damn thing yourself. And then you lose an hour/two of flow, which is the reward for the whole process.

But at certain times they are a godsend and they have completely replaced some of the more boring parts of my job. I wouldn't want to lose them, not at all.

Like the author, I don't think we're heading to a healthy balance where LLMs help us be better at our job. I do think the hype is going in the wrong direction, and I do worry for the state of our field (Or at least the _ideals_ of our field). Call me naive, but I also thought it mattered what the code was.