I don't see how LLMs change the picture then. The hobbyist who fell in love with programming didn't dream of Spring Boot configs, enterprise middleware or the Nth CRUD app either. There was already a huge gap between programming as a craft and programming as a job, and most people never had the privilege of working on anything particularly exciting or fun[1]. If your job is slop bread for 8 hours, and for most of us it already was, then the joy has to come from somewhere other than the job. That's the adjustment every one of those trades had to make.

[1] On another note, a lot of my friends who are professional musicians barely play or make music in their free time, apart from keeping their skills up.

I kind of agree. But I think LLMs just make it way worse than Sprint boot, enterprise middleware or anything similar ever could.

And I still very much like using LLMs for certain things. I do not miss Googling for hours to compile the right information.