Sure, most of what we're doing have been doing has already been done before, but that doesn't mean general intelligence is deprecated. It's not like we just keep repeating actions over and over without thought. For each problem we have, we adapt them and make changes to fit our specific context and needs. As long as humans and nature are involved, there's no such thing as a generalized solution that can be mechanistically applied to a general problem. I speak in the context software development and other activities that are creative or requires human judgment.

But yeah, I somewhat agree with you that a lot of the grunt work are going to be affected, jobs that are by nature purely mechanical, algorithmic or just plain parroting facts. But even then, I still highly doubt language models (today or with the following years) would deprecate those jobs. In the end, it's still a language model that is incapable of thought or reasoning.

If there one's thing I'm optimistic about the recent advances in AI, it's that more jobs will now be creative in nature. Hopefully gone are the days where schools are just mere factories for producing factoid parrots, where intelligence is measured by the size of one's esophagus to regurgitate.