This is exactly the approach I’m limiting myself to: LLMs as a very smart rubber duck to assist in research and understanding complex systems. I have no interest in it writing the code for me, just like I have no interest in another person doing the same.

I am the engineer, I am the one that has the vision, and I am the one that needs to understand the thing down to the minute details.

That said, most systems I still write are not so complex I need a very smart assistant, so I rarely use LLMs at all; it is still a valuable skill being able to research and think hard for yourself. An LLM cannot think out of the box (of its training dataset), and there lie the discoveries and paradigm shifts that move tech forward.