Many of those tasks can be completed via normal copy and paste. It's much faster to have the LLM do it. When you're initializing a client for a database in go, you can refer to the library on how to do it, or you can just let the LLM do it.
Maybe you have a photographic memory and you don't need to reference docs for other people's libraries, I don't have that ability. But the LLMs do, so I use them.
So the mere existence of “worthless” churn in your job isn’t evidence that you aren’t solving business problems that are worthy of pay.
To put it another way. Most jobs exist to make a problem go away for an executive.
I understand you are also getting at the ethos of good engineering and encouraging this person to take pride in their work.
> you've unwittingly settled into a role as an technician getting paid highly because of ephemeral demand bubble rather than the valuable engineer you might imagine yourself to be.
I have not seen this put so succinctly and this cannot be repeated enough.
Maybe so for you, but you might want to think about why your work involved so much boilerplate and routine content in the first place. If so much of it is easily completed by an LLM already, was your employer really paying you some large share of your 5-6 digits of compensation for every year? Do you think most of your value to the company has just been in typing boilerplate and mindlessly generating tests until now?
Personally, I'd feel pretty insecure in my career and underdeveloped in my trade if I could answer yes to that.
If it does apply to you (or others reading this), hopefully you can exploit this brief window of gained personal productivity to develop more valuable skills and get your tasked to more valuable roles asap. Software engineering as a profession isn't going anywhere, but the people most helped by today's fairly primitive LLM coding assistants are the ones that are actually vulnerable to be squeezed out of the trade because it means they're the not actually contributing very much specific expertise.
The productivity change you've experienced should be taken as a bright red warning flag that you've unwittingly settled into a role as an technician getting paid highly because of ephemeral demand bubble rather than the valuable engineer you might imagine yourself to be.