I almost think what a lot of people are coming to grips is with is how much code is unoriginal. The ones who've adjusted the fastest were humble to begin with. I don't want to claim the title, but I can certainly claim the imposter syndrome! If anything, LLMs validated something I always suspected. The amount of truly unique, relevant to success, code in a given project is often very small. More often than not, it's not grouped together either. Most of the time it's tailored to a given functionality. For example, a perfectly accurate Haversine distance is slower than an optimized one with tradeoffs. LLMs have not yet become adept at housing the ability to identify the need for those tradeoffs in context well or consistently, so you end up with generic code that works but not great. Can the LLM adjust if you explicitly instruct it to? Sure, sometimes! Sometimes it catches it in a thought loop too. Other times you have to roll up your sleeves and do the work like you said, which often still involves traditional research or thinking.

I disagree.

1) Senior developers are more likely to know how to approach a variety of tasks, including complex ones, in ways that work, and are more likely to (maybe almost subconsciously) stick to these proven design patterns rather than reinvent the wheel in some novel way. Even if the task itself is somewhat novel, they will break it down in familar ways into familar subtasks/patterns. For sure if a task does require some thinking outside the box, or a novel approach, then the senior developer might have better intuition on what to consider.

The major caveat to this is that I'm an old school developer, who started professionally in the early 80's, a time when you basically had to invent everything from scratch, so certainly there is no mental block to having to do so, and I'm aware there is at least a generation of developers that grew up with stack overflow and have much more of a mindset of building stuff using cut an paste, and less having to sit down and write much complex/novel code themselves.

2) I think the real distinction of senior vs junior programmers, that will carry over into the AI era, is that senior developers have had enough experience, at increasing levels of complexity, that they know how to architect and work on large complex projects where a more junior developer will flounder. In the AI coding world, at least for time being, until something closer to AGI is achieved (could be 10-20 years away), you still need to be able to plan and architect the project if you want to achieve a result where the outcome isn't just some random "I let the AI choose everything" experiment.

Why is this necessarily true?

If that's "the idea", then clearly we need a more holistic, useful degree to replace CS as "the" software degree.