Full disclosure, I'm on the Kilo Code team, but I read your analogy, and I have to respectfully disagree.
Musicians don't all use autotune, because autotune is a specalized technology used to elicit a specific result. BUT, MOST musicians use technology; either to record their work, or mix their tracks, or promote their work.
You could definitely say "A musician who doesn't post online to a platform or save their work in certain audio formats at the studio are going to be replaced by musicians who do."
Are there musicians who still release their work on vinyl or cassette tapes and prefer the sound of an stage with no microphones? Sure. But to dismiss the overarching influence of technology on the process would be ignoring where the progress is going.
I'd argue that people who use Kilo Code don't just "autotune" their code, they're using it as a tool that augments their workflow and lets them build more, faster. That's valuable to an employer. Where the engineer is still vital is in their ability to know what to ask for, how to ask for it, and how to correct the tool when it's wrong, because it'll never been 100% right.
It's just not hype, it's inevitable.
I actually agree with you that LLM assistance is inevitable. The fact that we can have small local models is what convinces me that the tech won't go away.
Even if things are going the direction you say, though, Kilo is still just a fork of VSCode. Lipstick on a pig, perhaps. I would bet that I know the strengths and weaknesses of your architecture quite a lot better than anyone on the Kilo team because the price of admission for you is not questioning any of VSCode's decisions, while I consider all of them worthy of questioning and have done so at great length in the process of building something from scratch that your team bypassed.
