A lot of us resist the pressure to move to management or technical leadership for just these reasons. Programming people isn't the same as programming computers.

But the LLMs outnumber us. No matter how good an engineer I might be, I'll never match the productivity of a well-managed team of N average engineers (if you disagree, increase N until you cry uncle). Sure, there will be mythical man-month problems. But the optimal N is surely greater than 1, and I'll never be more than 1.

Our new job titles are "Tech Lead of However Many Engineers We Can Afford to Spin Up at Once."