alt Hacker NewsLLMs certainly can interpolate between information found in its training set vastly faster than humans can find similar code on GitHub and stack overflow (or in math papers). It's certainly a tool that can be used when programming.
On the other hand also calculators help solve problems people have struggled with for millennia. It also doesn't mean that the end result is better than by hand. It's actually not, and that's the reason why you cannot replace programmers, because you need them to steer the LLMs for a good outcome.
And even the answer to the question, if LLMs make us more productive as programmers long-term is not really clear
The code is not better than an imaginary human paid to work on this as long as they wanted. But said human and sponsor did not seem to exist.
If not for LLMs this type of hardening would not be possible for me to justify at a startup, and I would have had to sigh and accept the huge attack surface of systemd.
I am a security engineer and there are unlimited things to harden, so LLMs let us harden a lot more in the same very limited time.