The author explained that the LLM needed a lot of hand-holding and that it was only possible because he himself is already an expert at it.

Quite a different message than yours.

I'm speaking on behalf of my friend. I don't want to misconstrue his message. Even though not a developer himself he is familiar to the command line and can for example manager backend stuff like containers. In that sense he's not a random computer user. He also dared to try. If he writes a blob about his attempt I'll share it back here.

My point was to share a related anecdote on using LLM to making seemingly unusable hardware usable again, which seems feasible (hence sharing the anecdote to confirm from another source) and IMHO a positive use case, while so many others are not necessarily so.