Because most of my career has been spent as an on-site programmer

Indeed. This is an awkward era where we're using these artificial language tools to target abstractions made for humans to manually write. At some point the path from human language to machine code is not going to require an interstitial step writing to higher level languages as we know them.

For a lot of people, LLM's are actually doing a better job than what they are capable of. I do worry that they are the people first up for replacement, since they don't really provide much value that the LLM itself can't provide. There isn't much point in paying a human to prompt an LLM if you could do it yourself, the value is in someone with the skill and judgement to both prompt it correctly and validate the output - and if the LLM is producing better code than the human is capable of they clearly don't have any of that. Personally I really like using LLMs because they have made certain things a lot more productive, but I don't feel like my job has really changed at all. I have a new way of generating code, but my value has never been my (abysmal) typing speed or knowledge of algorithms or how fast I can centre a div. It's been in the stuff that LLMs still haven't pierced, and probabl…