They're good for coding simple things for yourself if you don't want to learn to code or spend hours making something you will use once. Kinda like fast food.

You could argue I can learn to cook better and spend the time to do so. But I don't always want to and fast food is good enough. Same with llm. I can ask it to make me a Web app that does X and have it in seconds. All the usual worries about bugs and security don't apply as strongly to an app I make for just me that does just one thing.

Like say I'm at a takeaway shop with multiple people and the only menu is the board behind the counter. I take a couple photos, send them to the llm and say make me a menu app that I can add and remove items and it tracks the price. I will have it in under a minute and we can stop trying to read the board and block the counter and have the cashier patiently staring at us while we browse it in our own time and know exactly what the total will be.

Now you can quibble over whether that's "genuinely useful" or not. But it is to me. And I make tons of these simple one use apps for all kinds of things. And even if I was the best coder on earth, it still wouldn't be practical to hand make the same thing on the fly. Also hyper specific Firefox add-ons that don't exist because they're too specific to me and I didn't want to learn to make Firefox add-ons just to have them.

Even on the larger end, I wanted a lucid dream journal app and at the time the ones on the play store largely pay walled the best features and even pay walled exporting your journal. I didn't like that. So I had llm make me a basic one with the features I wanted, everything stored as txt files with export/import and ability to back up to drop box by oauth into a dedicated folder that can't touch the rest of my Dropbox. Even if llm disappeared and the app broke and I couldn't fix it I still have my entire journal as plain text.

So yeah. I find it useful. Because the alternative isn't me learning to code. It's these things not existing.