I find it helpful to investigate "I did it with an LLM" by imagining that (perhaps without the user's knowledge) the other end was another human.

This quickly engages a lot of social circuitry we've already developed when it comes to questions of what constitutes the user truly learning and having skills, what is meritorious, and who deserves most of the credit.

Similar to your contractor example, I like to think of the useful way to use LLMs as doing "grep -C" (show lines surrounding the match).

You provide some context you are looking to expand on and let the LLM autocomplete provide you with relevant terms and concepts that have historically come up in that context and may or may not be actually useful. Then you do due diligence to learn about those related concepts, determine their applicability and distill it all down into a solution.