In the 1930s, when electronic calculators were first introduced, there was a widespread belief that accounting as a career was finished. Instead, the opposite became true. Accounting as a profession grew, becoming far more analytical/strategic than it had been previously.

You are correct that these models primarily address problems that have already been solved. However, that has always been the case for the majority of technical challenges. Before LLMs, we would often spend days searching Stack Overflow to find and adapt the right solution.

Another way to look at this is through the lens of problem decomposition as well. If a complex problem is a collection of sub-problems, receiving immediate solutions for those components accelerates the path to the final result.

For example, I was recently struggling with a UI feature where I wanted cards to follow a fan-like arc. I couldn't quite get the implementation right until I gave it to Gemini. It didn't solve the entire problem for me, but it suggested an approach involving polar coordinates and sine/cosine values. I was able to take that foundational logic turn it into a feature I wanted.

Was it a 100x productivity gain? No. But it was easily a 2x gain, because it replaced hours of searching and waiting for a mental breakthrough with immediate direction.

There was also a relevant thread on Hacker News recently regarding "vibe coding":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45205232

The developer created a unique game using scroll behavior as the primary input. While the technical aspects of scroll events are certainly "solved" problems, the creative application was novel.

The story you're describing doesn't seem much better than one could get from googling around and going on stackoverflow