I do understand the feeling, though I genuinely can't help but feel jealous! I've spent most of my teenage years learning everything I could about software, with a particular focus on low-level systems programming, small finicky cache line optimizations, SIMD, DOD, and the year I enter the workforce ChatGPT comes out and suddenly all that stuff is "solved".

I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.

What you learnt is still useful in terms of training your mind to think critically.

To summarize 15 years of experience for you: You keep learning non-stop the entire time and after 15 years, you've got a really good high level view and you've built up an intuition for how to separate code in a way to minimize complexity whilst maximizing maintainability, reliability and performance... But you still miss stuff, miss some security vulnerabilities; because complex projects give you so many things to think about, it's a struggle to attend to everything. The one real advantage is that what you miss is generally easy to fix (thanks to your design intuition).

Even after 15 years, though, my feeling is that I'm still not skeptical enough. Solving problems with software is really hard. The more experience I have, the harder it appears to be. I'm a much better coder now than I ever was by an order of magnitude but I trust my own code less than I ever did. AI is can help a junior a lot; you just have to be humble about your output and be very critical of it.