In my experience (programmer since 1983), it's massively faster to leverage an LLM and obtain quality code when working with technology that I'm proficient in.

In my experience (programmer since 1983), it's massively faster to leverage an LLM and obtain quality code when working with technology that I'm proficient in. But when I don't have expertise, it's the same speed or even slower. The better I am at something, the faster the LLM coding goes. I'm still trying to get better at Rust, and I'm past break-even now. So I could use LLMs for a speed boost. But I still hand-write all my code because I'm still gaining expertise. (Here I lean into LLMs in a student capacity, which is different.) Related to this, I often ask LLMs for code reviews. The number of suggestions it makes that I think are good is inversely proportional to the experience I have with the particular tech used. The ability to discard bad suggestions is valuable. This is why I think bring an excellent dev with the fundamentals is still important—critical, even—when coding with LLMs. If I were still in a hiring role, I'd hire people with good dev skills over people with poor dev skills every time, regardless of how adept they were at prompting.