>I'm in my mid-40's now. I taught myself C when I was 15. I have no desire to use LLMs to pump out code.

For me, it's the other way around: I'm glad that AI can write code for me. A few months ago, I moved from an engineering role to a researcher role exactly because I got tired of writing code. Probably 95% of code/features (at least the kind you get paid for) is just boring CRUD stuff where you move bytes from one place to another and then show them in the UI (plus some access rules and a few invariants here and there).

All of it was actually interesting in the first couple of years. But when you do it over and over again for 20 years in a row... Yeah. Sometimes there are interesting projects from time to time, but usually it's the same stuff you've done countless times. Deja vu.

In my current researcher role, my task is to explore novel ideas, productize research papers, etc., and LLMs allow me to quickly write prototypes and demos, play with various ideas, without having to spend a lot of time manually moving bytes from one place to another. It’s fun again.

I'm in a similar age and career point and have similar feelings about my SE job atm. Can you share more about your transition to the researcher role? What field are you in, how did you get there, what problems did you encounter, etc.