It's great in unfamiliar terrain.

It's great when the terrain is unfamiliar to the user but extremely familiar to the LLM. And it's useless in the opposite.

The best programmers are going to be extremely familiar with terrains that are unfamiliar to the LLMs, which is why their views are so negative. These are people working on core parts of complex high performing highly scalable systems, and people with extreme appreciation for the craft of programming and code quality.

But the most productive developers focused on higher level user value and functionality (e.g pumping out full stack apps or features), are more likely to be working with commonly used technologies while also jumping around between technologies as a means to a functionality or UX objective rather than an end of skill development, elegant code, or satisfying curiosity.

I think this explains a lot of the difference in perspectives. LLMs offer value in the latter but not the former.

It's a shame that so many of the people in one context can't empathize with the people in the other.