The people who have this "hobby" attitude of really appreciating the well made steps are the ones that are making deep advances and truly solid things that are used in the long term.

Not at all. We have lots of products (corrugated steel, yoghurt, microwave ovens) that were part of the process of getting somewhere (else) and became the end product. Lots of engineers involved.

as pointed out in the conclusion! that is about specifically the fact even an engineer, who i assume got into this job because they liked doing it as a hobby, should still have some fun with engineering in their personal projects themselves instead of offloading it to an LLM.

i agree that LLM use in work as a software engineer is fully inevitable at this point, because we are all expected to move so fast