> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.

Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.