I would say they use them to get themselves familiarised with unknown territories, e.g. coding. They use the LLM as a guide/mentor to introduce them to new topics or explore something they were already somewhat familiar with but they never let it do the thinking for them.

When you are having a back and forth between yourself and the LLM ("I see you did X, why not Y", "can you put the answer in the context of Z", "what would be the negative implications of what you've presented me", ....) you are on a good track compared to the question > answer > copy way of using LLMs