I've been writing software professionally for 25 years and I am absolutely not dismissing them, on the contrary.
We are currently in a window where LLM's are helpful but nothing more, making them a great tool. I suspect that will last for a good while and probably turn me into more of a "conductor" in time -- instructing my IDE something like "let's replace this pattern with this other one", and have it create a PR for me that changes many files in one go. But I see absolutely no reason why the evolution shouldn't continue to the point where I just need to tell it what I want from a user perspective.
We are currently in a window where LLM's are helpful but nothing more, making them a great tool. I suspect that will last for a good while and probably turn me into more of a "conductor" in time -- instructing my IDE something like "let's replace this pattern with this other one", and have it create a PR for me that changes many files in one go. But I see absolutely no reason why the evolution shouldn't continue to the point where I just need to tell it what I want from a user perspective.