Even without writing code LLMs are a huge help, analyzing code, doing code reviews, documenting code, etc... Even without writing a line of "code" LLM hugely speed up development and take away the annoying/boring work.
In pretty much every case where I've previously thought "I wish we had a tool for this but I can't get the time funded to make it" I now just get ai to work on the tool in the background and check in on it whenever I have a few minutes of deadtime before / after meetings.
The benefits of the time savings of having progressily better tooling over time add up quickly.
I can read and write code why do I need an LLM to produce something I still have to read and test
Been using Claude Code for cost ops and reporting at work and it's saved an insane amount of time. I can generate a report in 10-15 minutes that would have taken 2-3 days of scripting/SQL and CC can even spit out a script to repro later.
It's not terribly hard to check either. You can do some spot checks with cost dashboards in AWS, Datadog, etc and see if the numbers line up
Can also tell Claude "go right size the environment, pull p95 usage metrics for the last 3 months" and a couple hours later, a bunch of money is saved. Much easier than manually pulling trend data and also easier than installing/configuring/managing tools that do it for you.