I find this a very useful analogy. Although it does not factor all the LLMs capabilties in.

I can also see them as very clever search engines, since this is one way I use them a lot: ask hard questions about a huge and legacy codebase.

These analogies do not really work for generating new code. A new metaphor I am starting to use is "translator engine": it is translating from human language to programming language. It in a way explains a lot of the stupidity I am seeing.