Not OP, but you nailed my feelings perfectly. I did not like managing for precisely this reason, and it never got better. The trenches are for me.
Re LLMs I love collaborative coding because I can sometimes pick up or teach new tricks. If I'm too tired to type the boilerplate I sometimes use an LLM. These are the only two redeeming values of LLM agents: they produce code or designs I can start from when I ask them too. I rarely do.
I hope OP can find a balance that works. It's sad to see the (claimed) state of the art be a soulless crank we have to turn.
I’ve been writing oversized shell scripts for ages, often just for the moment in Bash.
Then if I need something similar for a Dockerfile, I’d write that also. The duplication is a sad feeling.
So I described what I wanted, /bin/sh with posix, detailed what both scripts do, and it merged both scripts without ever seeing their full codebases! (Both for work and my own code, I never share code unless it’s already in a public repository)
I fired up ShellCheck linter and zero issues. At work I Replaced both tech-debt laden scripts with a repo and people said they’d use it too, NICE cleanup, and how long did it take? :-)
Relating back to OP, that sounds like an early win on a long campaign to boredom. I hope you continue to enjoy it though, there certainly nothing inevitable about ennui.