This has been exactly my experience. In my work as a senior SWE in my day-to-day areas of responsibility, if I’m stumped, then an LLM won’t even get close. But

This has been exactly my experience. In my work as a senior SWE in my day-to-day areas of responsibility, if I’m stumped, then an LLM won’t even get close. But when I experiment with new libraries and toolchains as a beginner, LLMs are like a private tutor. They can bring one up to lower mid level of experience pretty quickly. The knowledge gradient between the user and the LLM is important. I’m not sure if I’d say LLMs become useful again at a higher level of expertise/mastery though.