You can't play an entire orchestra's sheet music on a single guitar either, but your playing ability still matters a lot.

I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs. For example, it pays off to prepare an implementation plan with one LLM and then let another LLM check it for flaws, then again. After several iterations like this, you will have a plan better than whatever you could come up with yourself.

It often is the user and not the tool. LLMs are complicated, have nontrivial failure modes, and the user needs to steer them carefully. They might be the most complicated tools on the planet right now.

Anecdotally, the recipients of my work have become visibly more happy in the last months. LLMs are great at diagnosing subtle problems which tend to appear at Friday night only, and this is the sort of problem that bugs actual people the most.