Here's my optimistic take: the fundamental things that spark joy about learning a novel algorithm, pattern, technique, etc. haven't gone anywhere, and there's no reason to think those things won't continue to be interesting. Furthermore, it seems like reading code isn't going anywhere too soon, and that definitely benefits from clean code. It follows that someone who can actually recognize clean from spaghetti, and tell the LLM to refactor it into XYZ style, is going to be relatively more valuable.

Random side note: my teen son has grown up with iPhone-level tech, yet likes and finds my old Casio F91 watch very interesting. I still have faith :)

Junior here. There are still a few of us who value books and documentation. It's a weird time though. Hard to feel confident that you're learning in the correct way.

Anyway, I've found that if you want to get a coworker into reading technical books, the best way is with a novel or three. I've had good success with The Martian. The Phoenix Project might work too. Slip them fun books until they've built a habit and then drop The Mythical Man Month on them. :)

In almost forty years of experience, the fraction of developers I've known who read in the field beyond what's strictly needed for their task is very small. I'm always delighted when I find one.

IMO it is a valid question. Our AI has not yet reached that level, our prompts have not yet reached that level of sophistication. But I do not code in assembly any more, I do not do pointer arithmetic any more, so maybe some day we get to a state where we do not write python also. It is not going to be soon despite the AI bandwagon saying so, there are too many legacy pieces that are not documented well and not easy decipherable due to context window limits. But in 10 years ...maybe prompts is all we need.

PS: Not that we do not have people working at all levels of stack today, just that each level of stack, like a discussion going on today about python's JIT compiler will be a few (dozen or hundred) specialists. Everyone else can work with prompts.

I obviously wasn't there, but it sounds like maybe they were asking for reassurance. There's a lot of people out there saying that LLMs are going to totally replace regular programming, and for a new grad who doesn't know much about the world, they value your expertise.