I have played with LLMs (and many IDEs). I won't say they suck, but they don't give me any huge boost either. Other programmers may get more mileage out of them

I have played with LLMs (and many IDEs). I won't say they suck, but they don't give me any huge boost either. Other programmers may get more mileage out of them, but so far no one I have worked with reports any difference that seems more significant than novelty. We all feel more "productive" when we challenge ourselves to learn a new language, tool, programming technique, platform, etc. When that wears off we have to find the next shiny thing. LLMs have the added feature of FOMO and actual fear of unemployment that, for example, VSCode did not have. All tools take time to master, and then once mastered they can maintain an advantage over competitors that seem objectively better in some ways. I used VSCode for a year and ended up going back to vim. Nothing really wrong with VSCode but it wasn't a 10X or even 2X improvement for me. But I have internalized vim and the Unix/Linux command line tools to a degree that -- as you point out -- younger programmers don't have the runway to catch up with. As a freelancer (and for a long time a f/t employee in various companies) I gradually figured out that the best value I can offer (and the best way to stay employed) is not how fast I can produce code, but how well I can understand the business domain and then tease out and translate requirements into software solutions. Optimizing for producing more or "better" code (however we measure that) I think sends a lot of programmers down the wrong path, one that leads to over-specialization, commodification of skills, and eventual replacement by outsourcing or AI. I think it will take a lot longer for LLMs to do the real work of software development, which has about as much to do with producing code as word processing has to do with writing an interesting book.