Is the alleviating of the mental energy going to make you a worst programmer in the long run? Is this like skipping mental workouts that were ultimately keeping you sharp?

Also in my 40s and above senior level. Theres not many mental workouts in day to day coding because the world is just not a new challenge every day. What I consider 'boilerplate' just expands to include things I've written a dozen times before in a different context. AI can write that to my taste and I can tackle the few actual challenges.

At 51, no one hires me because of my coding ability. They hire me because I know how to talk to the “business” and lead (larger projects) or implement (smaller projects) and to help sales close deals.

Don’t get me wrong, I care very deeply about the organization and maintainability of my code and I don’t use “agents”. I carefully build my code (and my infrastructure as code based architecture) piece by piece through prompting.

And I do have enough paranoia about losing my coding ability - and I have lost some because of LLMs - that I keep a year in savings to have time to practice coding for three months while looking for a job.

I know a couple of people whose mental faculties took a sharp nosedive after they started relying on LLMs too much. They might be outliers but just a few years ago I considered them to be really sharp and these days they often struggle with pretty basic reasoning and problem solving.

Do coding in non-assembly programming languages make you a worse programmer in the long run because you are not exposed to the deepest level of complexity?