I think I've identified one strong area of LLM based engineering use that has brought something magical from science fiction into reality, and it's really great.

In many ways an LLM driven AI today is like a coworker. You have to take this colleague with a grain of salt because he could always decide to get overwhelmed and fabricate for you a confident response that in the worst case is deceiving in a way that will cause you to do damage. But, if you are careful enough to be able to tolerate this, then what it gives is an inexhaustible source of patience for digging into the details of something until you can be sure that you understand how it works.

The insight that I had today about this is a sudden realization that I drilled down repeatedly into some topic that I am not familiar. The recognition that I had was that in the course of working at real jobs with real humans, there are always areas of the business or software that end up falling deep into and it used to be the most effective and authoritative way to learn about the intricacies was to pester my human colleagues about inane details. My experience is that there is always some place you can push things that you will get a nice polite "left on read" response from somebody. First they give you great responses and great conversation, but they're just being nice. There is always a level of depth that you can go where we both sorta tacitly know that the time it will take to get to the bottom of the topic will not come close to the value of whatever we might be able to build off of that knowledge, so the discussion peters out.

AI has limitless patience. You will never have this happen. It's kinda nice.

By the way, the exact example of the topic I was going deep in the weeds with the AI with this time was the use of a tool called GYB (got your back) to backup my gmail mailboxes into some purpose-configured zfs datasets in my NAS machine. This has been a longtime dream of mine to take some of the control back over my sensitive personal information from the megacorps: Now, even though I will still continue to use my gmail account and subject my personal information to unmitigated snooping on GOOG's part, I am no longer going to be hostage to what amounts to a mafia shakedown security fee for my service to be suspended if I spend more than a month in excess of the arbitrary 15GB of data usage on each account. It's been a long time coming but I had to carefully implement the process so that I can be confident that I can rely on it going forward as I will be repeatedly deleting mails in order to stay under the allotted usage quota.