I feel like I'm in a dwindling minority of people who don't use LLMs to code at all. I have used them, and on each occasion it's proven such a tedious drag and a waste of time to prompt and reprompt, searching for the code I want, when I could have spent the time better writing it myself.

That's what I don't understand. Keynes (if I understand him) argued for government subsidies because there was no reason why people that produced goods one day couldn't just go on producing goods. There were at least profits the day before. I don't know what profitable goods OpenAI etc. produce.