alt Hacker News> 2. A one-shotted POC in the span of an hour with $4 of tokens that is clearly wrong in 20 different ways?
Definitely this. I've had plenty of useless meetings with no helpful outcomes that lasted an hour with 6 or more people in them, and a few of them will have had more than $4 spent on snacks, let alone everyone's wages.
That said, poor communication will always get you no matter what: had one day spent going back and forth with a client, they kept saying they wanted a button "wider" each time around, I ended up making it full screen width and they still said "wider", asked them to draw a picture and they finally said "wider vertically". That may or may not have been faster with an LLM, depending on if the LLM ever thought to ask the client to draw what they meant, but fundamentally would have been exactly the same problem.
It goes beyond this, the job is to understand the underlying need. When a clients asks for a button to be bigger, what's in their head is they fear it's not visible enough. Many times the client was happy when I implemented something unrelated but that solved the issue, like changing the colours to increase the contrast between the background and the button, adding space around, etc. so that it pops out more.