LLMs are cool but knowing why they work getting them to make a very common type of app doesn't show a great deal of emergent ability beyond searching a compressed space and reproducing a common pattern found in it.
It's easy to underestimate the amount and variability of the training data used. There are possibly tens of thousands of variations on todo apps available on github alone.
if it's only able to do the first 90% of the work, and I have to do the last 90% of the work, it's still saved me from doing that first 90% of the work.
My point is that it's such a game changer that you ignore it at your own peril. Just go into a side project, half-cocked and get shit built. Yes the code will be ugly but it got built. Maybe. It has its limits, as does the operator's patience, so it's entirely possible you'll run into a bug it can't fix. But a smart operator knows when to stop it and dig into the problem and fix it manually.
Funnily enough though, if you give it some toy code that doesn't ever complete, like a Fibonacci number generator and ask it if it will halt, it's able to point out that it won't. That, of course, is because those are in the training data, but it's cute nonetheless.
But I think if you know how to code well you can use code generators, whereas if you know how to use code generators you don't necessarily learn how to code. And being able to review generated code stems from mastering code, not from fiddling with prompts.
More generally, I think the premise that using code generators is a skill is empty. They don't require special skill beyond understanding programming well so it is probably a better use of my time to keep on coding and if someone wants to give me money to use code generators I am in a better position having spent lots of time writing code.
And if code generators become so good that it requires no skill to create software, then all this is moot. But of course I think that is nonsense because it seems to me that depends on the foundations of computer science being wrong.
I can't say how I'd actually feel if I was just starting out, but your position isn't unreasonable. I will disagree and say there is a certain skill to prompting, even though calling prompt engineering is maybe ridiculous. Given the way the industry is trending, getting code generators into a corner; having it run around in circles, and then having in skill to fix it by hand, quickly, is the skill to hone. Whether that comes from practicing writing code from scratch, or from using code generation and then fixing the bugs it creates though, is up for debate. I obviously think the latter but that's just a random person who's not in your shoes' opinion.
Best of luck to you in your career! Hopefully it goes well, no matter which direction it takes.