One thing that stood out in that comment: You said "you like" the act of programming elegantly and understanding the problem.

There's nothing wrong with that. Many of us do (or did) like programming and the problem-solving itch it scratched for us. But getting work done for pay is more than what we like. If an LLM can reliably solve a problem for me in a day that would have taken a project, a team of several people, and close to a month of work to build out manually, then I go with the tool that works.

And that "if" is the reality I live in. About a decade ago, I wrote a program to do analysis of config files for a product our team uses. It took me weeks of side-work to implement the idea of passing boolean python functions as checks for the configuration. Such an elegant way of creating new checks on our system! It was company work, and when I left to a new place, I didn't have that code, just the idea. Fast forward five years and I want to write the same thing at a new place. I asked an LLM to do the same task, and it wrote exactly my solution immediately. It just worked. It shocked me. In the last few months, I've had it write analysis tools against this product that would have taken me days or weeks. I am admittedly not a comp-sci level programmer.

There is no denying that LLMs are powerful coding tools. That can be true at the same time that we lament the end of manual-coding-for-pay, the death of programming education as we know it, and the worries about employment and society.