> the concepts just don't stick because I don't actually do the work

Yes! And this is the part of the de-skilling puzzle that is completely unaddressed by AI boosters.

Maybe LLMs are a force multiplier, but there still has to be some force to multiply, and I don't think a lot of folks ask the question of how that force is actually cultivated. This nebulous, airy-fairy notion that humans add "architecture" or "taste" doesn't tell the story of how, concretely, they came to have it. It seems to me there is no escaping that it came from typing the code.

Like you, I have a much better grasp of code and API surfaces I've physically typed than things LLMs have emitted and I have reviewed, in a conceptual sense, but which I could not have typed myself then, nor can type now.