> I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level
This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much more succinct and exact than English. I was never slowed down by how fast I could type (and maybe some are? I’ve watched people finger type and use the mouse excessively) but by how fast I could understand the existing systems. By the time I could write an expressive prompt in English I might as well have made the changes myself.
I’ve found it enormously useful as google on steroids or as a translator (which many changes that require code often end up being).
> This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much more succinct and exact than English.
Depends on how you use English. If you describe all the details down to the last line of requirements — then, yeah. But actually, a lot of requirements are typical and can be compressed to things like "make a configuration page following this config type" and LLM will figure it out and put checkboxes for booleans, drop-downs for enums, and all the boilerplate that goes with them. Sometimes you have to correct this output, but it's still much faster than describing the whole thing.