When I was doing research (physical electronics, lasers, fiberoptics and sensors stuff), lot of time was spent just writing all sorts of DAQ and processing code. So all this LLM stuff would have been really useful. There's a lot of data collection, data processing in the lab that require all sorts of ad hoc scripts and stuff. That was many years ago, but I would be surprised if the current crop of researchers are not using these things. And if they are not, then they are just not serious.