Writing high-level code was never as mechanical as “cutting piping.” That’s absurd. If that’s how you thought about writing code, you were simply a bad programmer.

The typing absolutely was mechanical. The thinking what you need to type is what's never been mechanical, and there's plenty of that to do LLM or not.

We took advantage of the typing time to also think, and in many ways typing code served a similar purpose to drafting your thoughts on paper. With an LLM you still think a lot and those thoughts turn into specs, prompts, plans, or whatever workflow you prefer.

Writing the code absolutely was. Every character we had to type was accidental complexity

You are conflating designing the system and instantiating it with code. This is exactly what I’m talking about.

Typing characters absolutely is cutting pipe and pouring concrete. It is not where the engineer was or is.

You are conflating system design with high-level programming (with typing, which is trivial and takes almost no time).

What exactly is the distinction you making between system design and high-level programming?