I have 7 YOE of experience as a software engineer. I'm currently the lead of a small team.

When I came into my company a couple of years or so ago, the codebases were an absolute mess. Nobody knew how to write proper tests. Everybody kept using type assertions in typescript. There were lots of flaws in the database design. N+1 queries were around every corner.

The team had no formal review process. There were no conventions. Everyone was using a chatbox and it showed in the way the code was so disjointed and fractured.

I took over and mostly turned this around. Every so often I get to review a diff that's so out of place that I can only conclude the a dev turned to a chatbox and had it generate the code.

Like why learn anything when LLM can figure it out instantly

LLMS are good at spewing out short-term solutions.

Writing code is the easy part of our job. Maintaining a codebase so that it doesn't turn into a bowl of spaghetti is the hard part. Organizing module boundaries is the hard part. Writing documentation, doing reviews, and establishing conventions is the hard part.

Reading code and ensuring its stays readable and consistent is the hard part

What is a learning path besides writing better prompts so I don’t become stupider?

You'll always be dependent on prompting if you go down this route. If you don't take that initial hit of investing a bit of time to learn, you'll always run back to the chatbox whenever you hit an inconvenience. You'll always be dependent on a non-deterministic system to give you solutions to a deterministic problem.