However, AI image generation is immensely helpful when I want to do a painting. Before I would find photos I liked and stitch them together, or try to imagine things. Now I can get an image much closer to reference.
With code, my feeling is that we have to write way too much of it right now to express what we want. I can write a small bit of text to the LLM and it will fill out 75%+ of the code over multiple files, which I then just need to shape. So much is structure that needs repeating in variations. I don't have an answer but it seems like there's something else missing from our tools and LLMs are providing a bad imitation of what it should be.