> the examples here involved more clever bit manipulation than most software engineers ever interact with

Perlis once quoth:

> 18. A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.

After 5 minutes of thought, I'd update that, for my hacking, to:

"A program without some convergence reasoning and a non-injective change of representation isn't worth writing."

(iow, I'd be happy to let LLMs, or at least other people, wrangle glue and parsley code, according to the taxonomy of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498382 )