To be specific on the garden leave: "[run to the truck] for some nails" is easy to formulate yet takes effort to do. The majority of the effort for most coding tasks is the formulation, and by the time you've explained to the lame duck how to do what needs to be done, and checked that they actually did it, it would've been easier to have done it yourself.
(were one to have suitable lame duck tasks, how would wetware lame ducks compete in an LLM world?)
(were one to have suitable lame duck tasks, how would wetware lame ducks compete in an LLM world?)