> Back before LLMs and before that again, it was very hard to write code. That's why so many people asked questions and figuring out how to write a piece of code was a big part of the value add

This may be true if you work in unfamiliar area or on frontier of programming. But this is not were most of programmer jobs are. That writing code itself is hard is a view of non-programmer. Programmers know that past some threshold of familiarity designing and weighting decisions becomes central problem.