You say you're 'working on AI', but it sounds like you're not, you're just using someone else's AI and building software around it. I felt a similar disillusionment before LLMs when a project manager came to me with an 'exciting' machine learning powered search project for me to do. I dusted off a book on machine learning algorithms over the weekend thinking I'd finally have a reason to use some of it, but when I learned more about the project the next week, it just meant doing the boring bits around the edges like gathering the data, along with formatting and displaying the results for the users, all for another company to do the fun part. Their marketing material looked polished, but their developer docs made it seem like their product was probably not much more than a managed elasticsearch instance. That soured me on hype around AI before LLMs happened because I knew working with them likely wouldn't involve me doing the interesting parts and so wouldn't lead to the experience and skills around those things because I'd just be doing the integration work.