This is why most of us get paid what we do, I’m sure you realize that. There is immense value in having engineers on a team/at a company that can do this.

> anything that requires boilerplate that can't be code genned

It is important to understand the boilerplate. It is also important to understand what is boilerplate and what isn’t. After these things are grasped, usually it’s a copypasta.

> actually writing the code of unit tests (the fun part is making code testable, and coming up with what to test)

If you don’t know how to write unit tests you don’t know how to write testable code. If you do know how to write unit tests you understand the value in maintaining them when you make code changes. Passing that off to a statistical next token predictor renders the tests largely useless

> fixing lint issues that can't be auto fixed yet

You should be thankful you didn’t write code in the 80s if this is a real stance. More thankful still that you rarely need to interact with code sans a linter or autocomplete. There are lots of technologies out there where this isn’t possible. Off the top of my head would be yocto recipes.

> removing old feature toggles

I’m not clear what this even means? You mean, doing your job?

> building a temporary test harness

Generate one, I don’t care. You’ll never know if it’s any good unless you go over the whole thing line by line. At which point, you didn’t save time and didn’t “level up” any skills