> I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs.
I am in that demographic. I have been hacking on other peoples' software as a necessity, to get it to work or to do things I wanted that it didn't yet do, all my career. LLMs came along and afforded me the opportunity to act like a full time programmer when I'm just a paranoid systems monkey who is normally obliged to treat programming as a barrier to be overcome, not a career or even primary hobby.
In my specific case, the reason I was yearning to write code but did not was simply because there weren't enough hours in the day, and I wasn't told that I should spend my on-the-clock hours doing it (unless it was for automating my job). So despite the fact that I have had hundreds of instructional hours of programming classes, learned the basics in half a dozen languages, and been "hacking" code for years, none of it stuck because I never had an employer say to me "right, you're going to be responsible for writing (or maintaining) this Perl app here..."
> Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?
Learning a programming language and then not getting to use it more than a few days every 3 years means you don't actually learn the language. It's more like a pleasant evening playing a game.
You and your colleagues are, I presume, programmers. I'd wager what I just described is Greek to you. So try to imagine it this way: somebody comes out with a crazy new prototype CPU. It's got a radically different ISA, so it doesn't even have C on it yet -- you have to poke registers with a brand new language that's like Ada on mescaline and it's built on a flavor of assembly that's like nothing you've ever heard of. So your boss tells you to learn it, then 2 weeks later pulls you off the project to do something normal and takes the dev board away.
If you don't see that CPU again for 3 years, how long are you going to retain that bit of knowledge you acquired? Well, that's what it's like for us programmer-adjacent nerds who spend all our time building systems, replacing failed components, crimping cables, writing disaster recovery documents, adjusting backup schedules, and getting woken the hell up night after night because another filesystem filled up.
I have no data to share on how many of us there are out there in similar situations world-wide, but I have met numerous traditional sysadmin in my time who were competent at automating things with shell scripts, not competent at writing "software" in "real" programming languages, and are probably using LLMs now to remedy that lack of skill.
For every 10 DevOps guys there may be one trad sysadmin out there who knows enough Perl to glue the server farm together and keep it running but can't be bothered to learn Python. Or the ratio may be the opposite. But whichever it is, that demographic very much exists.