You definitely save a ton of time over writing it yourself, just not as much time saved as “agentic” coding. I don’t do agentic coding either, I think it’s basically a scam. But using an LLM does mean creating stuff faster, much faster. The LLM can write 500 lines of code in seconds. That takes me hours.

I still design the APIs, the system, the tests. But the specific implementation of functions, I am freed from. There is a large speed gain there.