Of it's anything like my job, it's likely that a majority of the slowness is in the non-coding steps - meetings, upgrades/config, business ideation and prioritization, etc.

I mean, that's like most non-junior software development jobs--at least it has been the case for all the ones I've had: Actual, physical, typing-in-of-code is usually about 5-10% of any software developer's job. The rest is tools management, configuration, compiling, merging/source control, code reviews, helping other developers, brainstorming, planning, design reviews, bug management, status reporting, project management rituals like scrum, and so on.

I think many software developers have this romantic, idealized notion that their entire job should be furiously typing code into a computer, and that anything else they have to grudgingly do is unproductive overhead.

I was asked to help evaluate a couple code-generating LLMs at work, so I set out to build a couple toy apps in languages and frameworks I wasn't very familiar with.

My experience was that it was about as useful as searching Google and Stack Overflow without knowing what a good answer looks like. You copy and paste a lot of code, a lot of it works, but inevitably, something breaks and you have no idea why. So you still have to go back to "the hard way" of reading the documentation and building an understanding.

I'm sure things will improve over time, especially for products built specifically for code generation, but my first and second impression is that so far, LLMs don't actually lower the bar for junior programmers.

Maybe the devs now can work fewer hours since they more productive per hour.

Otherwise you're suggesting that these senior devs are using a tool which provides no value whatsoever which seems unlikely.