This matches my experience. LLMs are great at speeding up the easy but tedious bits, but they can’t even come close to independently identifying and solving the issues that come up in the development process which has always been like 90% of the work.

I definitely can do more with them, but the speed up isn’t anywhere close to an OOM. I would say they let me drift into scope I probably didn’t understand when I started, and that can be dangerous waters, but I absolutely use them as a tool to speed up my understanding of that new territory. And I wouldn’t say that pushing the boundaries of my understanding on ambitious projects is in anyway unusual for me. It’s just that I can push a little further a little faster.