> My coding has transitioned from coder to code reviewer/fixer vey quickly. Overall I feel like it's a good thing

Until you lose access to the LLM and find your ability has atrophied to the point you have to look up the simplest of keywords.

> the last few years of my life has been a repetition of frontend components and api endpoints, which to me has become too monotonous

It’s a surprise that so many people have this problem/complaint. Why don’t you use a snippet manager?! It’s lightweight, simple, fast, predictable, offline, and includes the best version of what you learned. We’ve had the technology for many many years.

> Until you lose access to the LLM and find your ability has atrophied to the point you have to look up the simplest of keywords.

I never remembered those keywords to begin with.

Checkmate!

Until you lose access to the LLM and find your ability has atrophied to the point you have to look up the simplest of keywords.

Devs shouldn't be blindly accepting the output of an LLM. They should always be reviewing it, and only committing the code that they're happy to be accountable for. Consequently your coding and syntax knowledge can't really atrophy like that.

Algorithms and data structures on the other hand...

> Until you lose access to the LLM and find your ability has atrophied to the point you have to look up the simplest of keywords.

You can locally run pretty decent coding models such as Qwen3 Coder in a RTX 4090 GPU through LM Studio or Ollama with Cline.

It's a good idea even if they give slightly worse results in average, as you can limit your spending of expensive tokens for trivial grunt work and use them only for the really hard questions where Claude or ChatGPT 5 will excel.

>Until you lose access to the LLM and find your ability has atrophied to the point you have to look up the simplest of keywords.

Realistically, that's probably never going to happen. Expecting it is just like the prepper mindset.