> Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?

You must be extremely talented and fast if LLMs make no difference for you.

For people like me though, it's another story: I've been doing this professionally for 25 years and of course, like many, I have been writing custom software for my own use all this time, on personal time. But with LLMs I get better results, faster and with very little effort. And that is the difference between another item in my list of unfinished software that consumed too much of my weekends and a cool utility/toy/useful thing I got after a few fun and interesting chat sessions.

> I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs.

We didn't lack LLMs, we lacked time and energy.