> Reducing problems to that state and designing that environment remains a skill, and one that I expect we will be paid handsomely for.

This seems to be what AI these days seems almost super humanly good at. See coding or math I guess.

But it does beg the question, why would a programmer using AI as a tool be worse than a programmer building the harness and environment and asking AI to go hogwild? The latter is definitely faster but if it's the former, atleast I will have an understanding how the system works. Weather that is valuable is an open question as far as I am concerned

I think the understanding is the most important piece here.

I've seen this called "cognitive debt".

If you don't understand the system you are building - if the AI gets too far ahead of you - then you lose the ability to reason about the system and make confident decisions about what to do next.

Reasoning about the system and making confident decisions is the job.