I don't find writing code painful, but I do find it tedious. The amount of time wasted on boilerplate keeps me from getting to the good stuff. LLMs let me speed run through all of that.

To take it back to your example, let's imagine Tolkien is spending a ton of time on setting up his typewriter, making sure he had his correction tape handy, verifying his spelling and correcting mistakes, ensuring his tab stops were setup to his writing standard, checking for punctuation marks, etc. Now imagine eliminating all that crap so he can focus on the artistic nature of the dialogue.