I feel like people are maybe underestimating the value of LLMs for some tasks. There's a lot of stuff where, I know how to do it but I can't remember the parameter order or the exact method name and the LLM absolutely knows. And I really get nothing out of trying to remember/look up the exact way to do something. Even when I do know, it often doesn't hurt to be like "can you give me a loop to replace all the occurrences of foo with bar in this array of strings" and I don't need to remember if it's string.replace(foo,bar), whether I need to use double or single quotes, if it's actually sub or gsub or whatever.

There's lots of tiny sub-problems that are totally inconsequential and an LLM can do for me, and I don't think I lose anything here. In fact maybe I take a little longer, I chat with the LLM about idioms a bit and my code ends up more idiomatic/more maintainable.

It kind of calls to mind something Steve Jobs said about how hotkeys are actually worse than using a mouse, and that keyboard users aren't faster, they just think they are. But using LLMs for these sorts of things feels similar in that, like using keyboard shortcuts, maybe it takes longer, but I can use muscle memory so I don't have to break flow, and I can focus on something else.

Asking the LLM for these sorts of trivial problems means I don't have to break flow, I can stay focused on the high-level problem.