But I also think you are overestimating your RESEARCH skills, even if you are very good at research, I am sure you can't read 25 files in parallel, summarize them (even if its missing some details) in 1 minute and then come up with somewhat working solution in the next 2 minutes.
I am pretty sure, humans can't comprehend reading 25 code files with each having at least 400 lines of non-boilerplate code in 2 minutes. LLM can do it and its very very good at summarizing.
I can even steer its summarizing skills by prompting where to focus on when its reading files (because now I can iterate 2-3 times for each RESEARCH task and improve my next attempt based on shortcomings in the previous attempt)
In this example, if the 25 files are organized nicely, and I had I nice IDE that listed class/namespace members of each file neatly, I might take 30 minutes to understand the overall structure.
Morever, If I critically analyzed this, I would ask "how many times does this event of summarizing 25 files happen"? I mean, are we changing codebases every day? No, it's a one time cost. Moreover, manually going through will provide insight not returned by LLM.
Obviously, every case is different, and perhaps you do need to RESEARCH new codebases often, I dunno!
* you probably lack good RESEARCH skills
* I can see at most 1.25x improvements - now it is 2-3x
By updating your comment you are making my reply irrelevant to your past response
Note1: I have "expert" level research skills. But LLMs still help me in research, but the boost is probably 1.2x max. But
Note2: By research, I mean googling, github search, forum search, etc. And quickly testing using jsfiddle/codepen, etc.