Knowing how things work, knowing what should be possible and where “there be dragons”, and having a pretty well-developed “sixth sense” for all kinds of things is proving just as valuable with LLM-heavy programming as it did before.

… but I am almost certain I’d never have developed those in the first place if I hadn’t spent 25ish years programming on a bunch of different platforms and setting up servers and networks and all that, without LLMs.

I dunno how you make another “me”, now, while before lots and lots of programmers naturally ended up as someone with skills and knowledge like mine, and those skills seem super useful when writing code with LLMs.