Whether the model "knows" something or not is irrelevant. It makes expert skills much less valuable. A big boon for individual productivity if you are not an expert in some field. What worries experts like the OP is their skills become much much less important. If you are an expert in some area and suddenly everyone else catches up almost, it will surely impact your wages.
Being entertained compels a lot of people. You can't make a living doing it. Programmers had the luxury to talk of passion projects because you could find something you liked and still made good money (Again talking of the average programmer, quoting one extreme side would be neither here nor there). People don't work in warehouses because if compels them.
If all the things that compel you don't make money, you should introspect instead of thinking about the glory days of what programmers did.
There is a large gulf between “LLM’s making my skills less valuable” (which I don’t even think is the case) and being jobless, not able to make a living.
The OP is not going to be jobless anytime soon if they have the skills that they say they do. Hell. Someone with less knowledge who just leans on a LLM isn’t as capable. HUMAN experience is valuable.
The OP may not become jobless, but would lose motivation to learn more (same as a recent post on HN about a designer demotivated due to their work now centred around midjourney).
As an analogy, people in robot (I use the term in a loose way for machines) assisted warehouse find the work far worse than one without robots, because the job becomes soulless and centred around the robots, making it much less fulfilling.
You've moved the goalpost multiple times. Are you concerned about the OP's ability to command top dollar for their current talents or that they have a job at all (you've expressed both), or the OP's feeling of fulfillment/motivation in what they do?
I go back to what I said before. If your fulfillment in life is centered around work, you need to re-evaluate. If the OP has no motivation to improve themselves for the sake of improving themselves, that's an OP problem that existed WAY before LLMs. Whether it's weightlifting, programing, or basketweaving, the OP needs to find some benchmarks for life that come from self motivation.
That being said, the OP will continue to be employed. Rather than miring in the existential crisis of "not being able to continue operating in the manner they do today", the OP needs to adapt and align their skills with this new tool. LLMs are tools.
