AI makes me sad

I recommend reframing this. LLMs don't make your hard-earned-knowledge less valuable: they make it more valuable. You are better qualified to use them to build great software than people who don't have your level of experience and software engineering domain expertise. If you don't want to do that then I guess you can find another career - but if you switch careers because you incorrectly think that LLMs make programming experience less valuable you would be making a big mistake in my opinion.

I think the important thing here is you're being honest about how you're feeling. You bring up a very real anxiety and possibility and even folks who are using LLMs probably feel some degree of this alienation. That LLMs are yet another tool to push us to move as fast as possible rather than have our brains get into the nooks and crannies of hard problems that may take longer but are more rewarding to us. But again, you're being honest. The problem with a lot of the AI skeptic arguments I see is a lack of this honesty. Others have noted that there are a lot of contradictory skeptical arguments, and I suspect the contradictions come because the authors have negative emotions about AI which they're using to create negative arguments.