This is far more true for junior and perhaps mid-career engineers, unless you're working in an extremely well-defined problem space (* see below).

When working as a SWE, the longer I did it (~30 years) more of my time was spent understanding the problem, the edge cases, how to handle the edge cases, how to do all of it affordable, on time, and within budget.

That's engineering.

What you're describing is "writing code". That's lower value than "solving the problem".

I imagine a response, "But agile development, etc."

Yep. Part of solving the often sometimes involves creating prototypes to determine the essential viability of the solution. But that's only part of it. Which prototypes do you write? How much time do you allocate to same before accepting it's a dead end (at least for now) and punting on it?

That's engineering.

Me probably coming across as a dick today? Well, I was diagnosed autistic a year ago, and I'm on extended sabbatical/unemployment (3 years now) due to autistic burnout. And masking is part of how I got the burnout.**

* Why would someone be paying for that when there is likely someone else already doing it? Unless you're the rare person who hopes to "disrupt" the competition).

** has me begging the question of why I write here at all. SMH. Why do I do what I do? No idea sometimes.

I'm going to mix my metaphors a bit here...

There's the saying "Any idiot can build a bridge; it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

To put this another way, any idiotic LLM can write code. It takes a person with domain experience to understand what code to write, rewrite, or not write.

I've seen lots of organizations hollow out their internal competence in favor of outsourcing the skills. LLMs are the ultimate expression of that. There are people who say "you need to have people in your organization who understand how things work because they're the ones who solve problems!" and there are other people who say "focus on your core competencies! These problems you're worried about aren't your core competencies, so get rid of those experts, they're expensive and annoying; we can just sign a contract with an organization that'll know things for us."

At some point we all will identify exactly how much "seed corn" you need for the next season. We'll figure that out because we're starving, but at least we'll all know.