I know that your post has lots of comments, but I'd like to weigh in kindly too.

> I've spent decades building up and accumulating expert knowledge and now that has been massively devalued.

Listen to the comments that say that experience is more valuable than ever.

> Any idiot can now prompt their way to the same software.

No they cannot. You and an LLM can build something together far more powerful and sophisticated than you ever could have dreamt, and you can do it because of your decades of experience. A newbie cannot recognize the patterns of a project gone bad without that experience.

> I feel depressed and very unmotivated and expect to retire soon.

Welcome to the industry. :) It happens. Why not take a break? Work on a side project, something you love to do.

> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.

Once upon a time painters and illustrators were not "artists", but archivists and documenters. They were hired to archive what something looked like, and they were largely evaluated on that metric alone. When photography took that role, painters and illustrators had to re-evaluate their social role, and they became artists and interpreters. Impressionism, surrealism, conceptualism, post-modernism are examples of art movements that, in my interpretation, were still attempting to grapple with that shift decades, even a century later.

Today, we SWE are grappling with a very similar shift. People using LLMs to create software are not poor coders any more (or less) than photographers were poor painters. Painters and illustrators became very valuable after the invention of photography, arguably more valuable socially than before.