That said, I found myself doing little text mangling tasks with GPT-4 instead of appropriate command line tools, because fuck if I remember the flags to sort and unique, and it's much faster to just describe what I want and have the LLM take a crack at it.

This is why, I think, you'll see a lot of simple(ish) tasks being done by LLMs, at couple orders of magnitude more compute cost - it's just that much more convenient.