It's not even a fair comparison - the effort involved in learning and building stuff from the internet (in the pre-LLM era) is an order of magnitude higher than turning your OAI/Anthropic account into an absolute slop cannon.

I'm primarily backend dev, but want able to prompt my way into building tiny JS web apps for personal use.

Wife always wanted to write animated story books for kids, and was actually able to create a bunch with Gemini (our daughter enjoys these more than the store-bought ones, since they're tailord/personalized for her).