Someone raised the point in another recent HN LLM thread that the primary productivity benefit of LLMs in programing is the copyright laundering.

The argument went that the main reason the now-ancient push for code reuse failed to deliver anything close to its hypothetical maximum benefit was because copyright got in the way. Result: tons and tons of wheel-reinvention, like, to the point that most of what programmers do day to day is reinvent wheels.

LLMs essentially provide fine-grained contextual search of existing code, while also stripping copyright from whatever they find. Ta-da! Problem solved.