I wish that I could agree with you that "There is always room for people who know what they are talking about." I think that you are right in the long term. Eventually we will return to a world that values people who know what they are talking about.

In the short term, I have seen a lot of managers and other higher-ups talk about how we do not need to worry about low-level details anymore. In their minds, we are now all designers and architects, so we do not think about the small implementation details that ultimately do matter for performance and reliability.

People who know what they are talking about worry about all of the details from the big picture down to the small scales. We can still operate using abstractions like designers and architects, but we must know enough to choose the right abstractions that account for the concrete details properly. I've discussed this point earlier this year [1] using the tree swing diagram [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422597

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_swing_cartoon

> I'm less pessimistic than the author though. There is always room for people who know what they are talking about. Take a deep breath.

But what will their day to day look like? Meetings?

Previously, I'd have to work days undisturbed to get important stuff out of the door. There was effort involved to reach an elegant solution that fit business need.

Now I'm a meat bag pressing enter on a "recommended" option Claude already figured out was the best approach.

One suggestion for the feeling that has been great for me. Finding a hobby where you can focus on sweating the details. Detach it from economic imperative (the core definition of a hobby, you dont make money from it). Ham radio, maker and micro electronics, woodworking, calligraphy, music. Of course there are more technically advanced solutions to the problem, that's not the point. The point is the effort and discovery.

I was never the best programmer and never was to keen on building things or providing some value to users. I'm more interested in how systems work, especially computers and the OS, and so far, LLMs haven't taken that away from me. If programming and solving problems had been important to me, I'd probably have a problem right now. While I feel for OP, what interests him most—namely, understanding things and developing an intuition for them—is not a productive activity in the sense that it’s not about building or producing things. But the job of a software developer has always been exactly that and LLMs take an ongoing trend to the extreme. I think people like OP have no choice but to separate their personal interests from their job, as hard that may be.

Room where? You're obviously not going to hire someone for their knowledge alone in late 2026... ChatGPT probably knows more than you know in every domain. What questions could I ask you that ChatGPT wouldn't be able to answer?