It's similar to how if you know what you're doing you can manage a simple VPS and scale a lot more cost effectively than something like vercel.
In a saturated market margins are everything. You can't necessarily afford to be giving all your margins to anthropic and vercel.
Their might always be llms, but the dependence is an interesting topic.
But I'm also afraid / certain that LLMs are able to figure out legacy code (as long as enough fits in their context window), so it's tenuous at best.
Also, funny you mentioned HTML / CSS because for a while (...in the 90's / 2000's) it looked like nobody needed to actually learn those because of tools like Dreamweaver / Frontpage.
Even the briefest of Google searches show they make around the same as any other enterprise dev if not slightly less.
Say you are a good coder now, but you are becoming a custodian, checking the llm work will slowly erode your skills. Maybe if you got a good memory or an amazing skillset it might be some time, but if you don’t use it, you lose it.
FAANG new grads make more. If the COBOL devs had upskilled throughout their career they'd be Senior Staff/Principal+ and making 5-10x more than they do today.
I think that was about 10 years ago…