Similar to your contractor example, I like to think of the useful way to use LLMs as doing "grep -C" (show lines surrounding the match).

You provide some context you are looking to expand on and let the LLM autocomplete provide you with relevant terms and concepts that have historically come up in that context and may or may not be actually useful. Then you do due diligence to learn about those related concepts, determine their applicability and distill it all down into a solution.