Not really. Similarly to humans, it's easier to write code than read it; LLMs aren't particularly less efficient at doing off the cuff tasks vs reading in all

Not really. Similarly to humans, it's easier to write code than read it; LLMs aren't particularly less efficient at doing off the cuff tasks vs reading in all of the tokens of documentation for a specific tool (assuming you did the legwork of manually feeding that tool to the LLM, which makes it less efficient for you) and then coming up with a solution. And that argument would only apply if there were custom tools for each of the infinite possible tasks, which there aren't.