It’s definitely true that LLMs don’t live up to the hype of making everyone 10x faster, and possibly in the aggregate don’t even make anyone that much more productive, perhaps in many cases even reducing productivity overall.

My use of LLMs is often geared towards improving the quality of my work instead of going faster, though. Sharing a plan and having it point out things I may have failed to consider, having a LLM review a PR and possibly find issues human reviewers overlooked, create multiple HTML + CSS prototypes for a web UI so I can pick the best elements of each design instead of just going with one design I made myself, create and maintain a set of tests I might not otherwise have bothered with, etc.

Since in software engineering, quality is speed, using LLMs to improve quality can also improve speed.

Overall, using LLMs to expand your thinking instead of using them to think for you works pretty well, IMO.