Personally speaking, the feeling of "getting the thing and then having the thing" - the personal todo app, the custom apps - is why I do anything in programming. Programming is the project where I can speak a spell and then I get a nice thing. That's very cool, and I do like the process, but at the end of the day the nice thing is what I'm doing it for- it's not a side benefit, it's the payoff. I get a burst of happiness every time that the thing quietly does its thing that I wouldn't have had otherwise. So to me, the LLM mostly just feels like I suddenly got a lot of friends who are willing to help me get the thing and also have a very complementary skillset. So it's an improvement, and then there's also a reward at the end!

Example: I'm playing Satisfactory right now, with a mod that puts a computer in the game that can control game events. I use the computer to do cargo train routing in the game, ie. it runs a program that scans target cargo depots and looks for items that are below a level, and then dispatches trains to find these items and bring them to the destination. Which I once would have written by hand, but was now done entirely by Sonnet. I did have to put plenty of effort into guiding Sonnet to the approach that worked, and I put several AIs together, and this felt a lot like "explaining something" which is a process I enjoy uncomplicatedly anyways. And I think, to be honest, the enjoyment I would have gotten out of the programming part once, was very largely "type-2 fun"- an annoyance followed by a nice reward. Now I'm getting the nice reward for free and can focus on actual industrial and rail network design. And I still get a burst of happiness every time I see a train busily speed off to a new destination. So far as I can tell, at least for me it's all upside.