Ask HN: Which tools, skills, and knowledge are your alternative to LLMs?

A lot of folks are upskilling themselves on how to effectively use LLMs for tasks such as software development, planning, writing, and more. Along with doing this, I think it's important to contrast the output of LLMs to what we can accomplish without them. What surprises you that people use LLMs to do instead of doing it by other means?

An example I've seen is find and replace in a file, instead of using the built-in editor tool, or a tool such as sed, possibly combined with regular expressions.

What are your thoughts?