Honestly, I'm curious why your experience is so different from mine. Approximately 50% of the time for me, LLMs hallucinate APIs, which is deeply frustrating and sometimes costs me more time than it would have taken to just look up the API. I still use them regularly, and the net value they've imparted has been overall greater than zero, but in general, my experience has been decidedly mixed.
It might be simply that my code tends to be in specialized areas in which the LLM has little training data. Still, I get regular frustrating API hallucinations even in areas you'd think would be perfect use cases, like writing Blender plugins, where the documentation is poor (so the LLM has a relatively higher advantage over reading the documentation) and examples are plentiful.
Edit: Specifically, the frustrating pattern is: (1) the LLM produces some code that contains hallucinated APIs; (2) in order to test (or even compile) that code, I need to write some extra supporting code to integrate it into my project; (3) I discover that the APIs were hallucinated because the code doesn't work; (4) now I not only have to rewrite the LLM's code, but I also have to rewrite all the supporting code I wrote, because it was based around a pattern that didn't work. Overall, this adds up to more time than if I had just written the code from scratch.
