I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers...

The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.

With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...

That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.

I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.

I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.

Filling your retirement with all those rainbows and unicorns nobody but you care is fine, but what do those who are not retired yet do?

The same. Think in systems, interfaces, integrations, the problem at hand. Zoom out, leave the grunt work and yak shaving to the machine, and keep your eyes on the price. If you only get satisfaction when you hand set functions in a particular way, then the only thing to say is that time is moving on.