For me it’s mostly useful in day-to-day coding, not “build an entire app and walk away” coding.
TDD was never really my natural style, but LLMs are great at generating the obvious test cases quickly. That lets me spend more of my attention on the edge cases, the invariants, and the parts that actually need judgment.
Frontend is another area where they help a lot. It’s not my strongest side, so pairing an LLM with shadcn/ui gets me to a decent, responsive UI much faster than I would on my own. Same with deployment and infra glue work across Cloudflare, AWS, Hetzner, and similar platforms.
I’m basically a generalist with stronger instincts in backend work, data modeling, and system design. So the value for me is that I can lean into those strengths and use LLMs to cover more ground in the areas where I’m weaker.
That said, I do think this only works if you’re using them as leverage, not as a substitute for taste or judgment.