If it's not something very common LLMs could end up generating random code.
Also if you work on something performance critical, you can get inspiration from LLMs, but they often don't write fast code.
Niche is more like "ISO26262 compliant, response time under 50ms, measured with a oscilloscope with at least 40MHz bandwidth, failure rate less than 10^-7, proven with maths and soak tests". It gets more niche the closer you get to hardware.
Next word prediction will get you laughed out of the room.
In my experience performance of LLMs can be surprisingly good on things that are not mainstream, like database engineering, and surprisingly bad at mainstream categories approached in an unconventional way.
That said, I'm amazed that you have 50 years of experience and still able to have the mental flexibility to adapt to new development paradigms.
As you imply, this stuff isn't simple to pick up, and is completely different on how we have done our job without AI.
This is the root of age discrimination in technology fields.
Just to clarify, I meant to share admiration toward a fellow engineer.
I do not think that age implies any hard assumption, usually brings cultural diversity which is good.
The approach to get there is the differentiate factor. If you are to tell a probabilistic tool to be 99.9999999% correct it would just be silly.