Hey, friend, let's see if my account helps ease your worries a little.
Three years ago I decided to learn how to code, even though I was already 35 years old. My line of work is a bit far away from tech… I'm still trying to learn everyday, but going real slow because of work and some mental health stuff. Even though LLMs have been already a thing for a couple of years, I only managed to first try my hand at them a couple of months ago. Understand that I have very low self-esteem and that social anxiety prevents me from asking for help, even online — I think I might have done so less than 5 times my whole life, and I've been online since I was kid in 1996…
Asking a complex text generator for help feels a lot more comfortable for me, even though there are ups and downs. I'm not sure if what I'm doing is the same as what everyone is calling "vibe coding", but it has been a real game changer in my self-study routine. I know LLMs sometimes (often?) write "unorthodox" code, but I like studying their output and comparing it to other stuff I find online. I'm sure there are better ways to learn, and I still wish to become like experienced programmers who learned their trade before these tools were around.
Anyway, yeah, the machine helps. But I believe you're only feeling like the machine can make most of your work (or maybe replace you?) because your experience enables you to use the machine effectively. See it from my perspective as a baginner: I managed to do more than I could before, sure, but I quickly noticed I'll never get better at it if I don't learn how to "speak" it. At best, it would feel like knowing a foreign language "instrumentally", like enough to read a text if you have a dictionary beside you, but not near enough to strike a conversation with a native speaker of that language. If everything goes well, most beginners will soon realize that they need to know much more, even if just to write better prompts when asking for code. But, if all goes bad… I don't know yet…
I worry about that too — like I worry about my young nephew and niece who barely touched a physical keyboard their entire lives and cannot touch-type to save their lives if they needed to. Whatever happens, we have to make the best of it. I would still be striving to be like more experienced engineers anyway, with or without LLMs around. But I can only speak for myself.
I hope you feel at least a bit less sad by knowing there are still people out here who appreciate the effort people like you took.