wouldn't that still add a lot of value, where the person in the loop (sadly, usually) becomes little more than the verifier, but can process a lot more work?

Anecdotally what I'm hearing is that this is pretty much how LLMs are helping programmers get more done, including the work being less enjoyable because it involves more verification and rubber-stamping.

For the business owner, it doesn't matter that the nature of the work has changed, as long as that one person can get more work done. Even worse, the business owner probably doesn't care as much about the quality of the resulting work, as long as it works.

I'm reminded of how much of my work has involved implementing solutions that took less careful thought, where even when I outlined the drawbacks, the owner wanted it done the quick way. And if the problems arose, often quite a bit later, it was as if they hadn't made that initial decision in the first place.

For my personal tinkering, I've all but defaulted to the LLMs returning suggested actions at logical points in the workflow, leaving me to confirm or cancel whatever it came up with. this definitely still makes the process faster, just not as magically automatic.