It's allowed me to learn things more quickly. For example, I haven't written any C++ professionally for 20 years, and found myself in the position of needing to know it again. The existing material online for learning it is thick; sometimes I have a question that isn't answered directly or clearly in any way I can find with a standard search. I can grill the LLM much more quickly and pointedly.

However, this does not answer the usefulness-at-work question. Does anyone care if I know how the initializer list braces in constructor `Foo{1,2}` work? Today for hiring managers smitten with AI, seems like they don't.

Personally, I'm just trying to stay sharp on the off-chance that things crash out and people who know how to engineer *and* code become highly valuable. If not, I'll be doing something else, anyway.