[danielbln]

No they don't do requirements gathering, they also don't cook my food and wash my clothing. Some things are out of scope for an LLM.

Yes, they can do analysis, identify conflicting specs, etc. especially with a skilled human in the loop

Yes, they help with design, though this works best if the operator has sufficient knowledge.

The LLM can help significantly by walking through the code base, explaining parts of it in variable depth.

Yes, agentic LLMs can easily write tests, run them, validate the output (again, best used with an experienced operator so that anti-patterns are spotted early).

From your posts I gather you have not yet worked with a strong LLM in an agentic harness, which you can think of as almost a general purpose automation solution that can either handle, or heavily support most if not all of your points that you have mentioned.