This is a fantastic point, and it's what most software businesses have at their core. They just provide the tools to get something else done. A lot of these smaller places are going to be devastated when people become far more self reliant (or I should say reliant on the AI providers) than them.

A “tool to get things done” doesn’t seem to contradict the math or engineering point of view. Which is to say, a screwdriver is an engineered device that is also a tool (it also has a mathematical description I guess, just, a fairly boring one from a pure math point of view I guess).

Sure, but the relationship is different.

Imagine going to school, a boot camp, or being self taught in everything about screwdrivers and screws. You can discuss at length the advantages and disadvantages of different shapes (Robertson bits > all), materials, screw threads, etc. You can custom design a screwdriver and screw for a specific application, taking into account all of the relevant constraints.

Now imagine the guy who needs to tighten a loose cabinet door.

Their relationships with the tools are entirely different. Screwdrivers don’t have nearly the complexity or ability to generate work leverage that computers do, moving even a few percent of those capabilities from the first group to the second is huge. It is, at minimum, Excel huge.

That's a great analogy which I will steal.

A personalized sociopathic fabulist for all!

My analysis is limited to tech people.

For the rest of the world, while some might be excited by what you describe (and it that works for them, that's great!), I believe in general the interpretation is far simpler: me like shiny.

This is some very CS high-horse thinking. I work with people who are already using it in ways that meaningfully improve their existing workflows. It isn’t doing anything special to someone who makes a living on computers, but it is doing things they couldn’t do without those people.

Genuine question, are you seeing non-coders using it to do any useful coding? As a developer, I find that it is wrong more often than it is right and were it not for my domain knowledge, I would have no idea why (or sometimes when.)

/r/iamverysmart

This nails it on the head pretty much for me. I'm personally hugely interested in the potential of LLMs to enable me, a non coder, to create programs that might only have marginal utility to others, so are likely not going to get built by anyone who actually knows how to do this stuff, and aren't exactly important enough for me to actually learn how to code (I don't really have the right type of brain for it anyway) but are interesting / useful enough to me to figure out how to get LLMs to make them for me, as I don't really care how they work as long as they do.