Maybe they’re just orders of magnitude more useful at the beginning of a career, when it’s more important to digest and distill readily-available information than to come up with original solutions to edge cases or solve gnarly puzzles?
Maybe I also simply don’t write enough code anymore :)
Just yesterday, I asked if Typescript has the concept of a "late" type, similar to Dart, because I didn't want to annotate a type with "| null" when I knew it would be bound before it was used. Searching for info would have taken me much longer than asking the LLM, and the LLM was able to frame the answer from a Dart perspective.
I would say that that information neither "important to digest" nor "readily available."
For me, it's been able to give very good answers when they were within the first few Google results when searched for using the proper terms (but the value is in giving you these terms in the first place!).
For questions from my field, it's been wildly hallucinating and producing half-truths, outdated information, or complete nonsense. Which is also fair, because the documentation where the answers could be found is often proprietary, and even then it's either outdated or outright wrong half of the time :)