You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.
it seems you and others took my words a bit more literally than I intended for them to come across. it's not like I'm just one-shotting all my ideas directly into existence, I still need to understand how to use the tool to do it. it's just a different tool. one that's allowing me to build way more than I ever have, while having a ton of fun doing it.
and sure, your analogy seems reasonable if I was simply buying the code w/ my tokens. that wouldn't be fun or fulfilling at all - it's more like there is some new "cooking" tool that immediately spawns 90% of the ingredients pre-cut & prepped (maybe the other 10% isn't exactly what I asked for but I can improvise with it) and gives me a decent recipe based on the idea of what I wanted to cook in the first place that fills in (and gives me a starting point to learn about) the gaps that I didn't even realize I was missing. I see it more as: "All this time I thought I loved chopping onions and setting up the grill, but actually I just loved cooking".
you weren't wrong about the mcdonalds though. I do love mcdonalds
They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.
They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.