Go ahead, convince me. Please describe clearly and concisely in one or two sentences the clear economic value/advantage of LLMs.
That’s one example, there are dozens of processes that are now relatively easy to automate due to LLMs.
This is making me even more skeptical of your claims. Individual metrics are often very poor at tracking reality.
People love stuff that makes them feel like they are doing less work. Cognitive biases distort reality and rational thinking, we know this already through behavioural economics.
Citation needed. In my circles, Senior engineer are not using them a lot, or in very specific use cases. My company is blocking LLMs use apart from a few pilots (which I am part of, and while claude code is cool, its effectiveness on a 10-year old distributed codebase is pretty low).
You can't make sweeping statements like this, software engineering is a large field.
And I use claude code for my personal projects, I think it's really cool. But the code quality is still not there.
that goes both ways
Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.
It does not, technology regresses just as often and linear deterministic progress is just a myth to begin with. There is no guarantee for technology to move forward and always make things better.
There are plenty of examples to be made where technology has made certain things worse.
That's not all it does but I think it's one of the more important fundamentals.
1) CASE tools (and UML driven development)
2) Wizard driven code.
3) Distributed objects
4) Microservices
These all really were the hot thing with massive pressure to adopt them just like now. The Microsoft demos of Access wizards generating a complete solution for your business had that same wow feeling as LLM code. That's not to say that LLM code won't succeed but it is to say that this statement is definitely false:
> Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.
Just by having lived longer, they might've had the chance to develop some intuition about the true cost of disruption, and about how whatever Google's doing is not a free lunch. Of course, neither them, nor you (nor I for that matter) had been taught the conceptual tools to analyze some workings of some Ivy League whiz kinds that have been assigned to be "eating the world" this generation.
Instead we've been incentivized to teach ourselves how to be motivated by post-hoc rationalizations. And ones we have to produce at our own expense too. Yummy.
Didn't Saint Google end up enshittifying people's very idea of how much "all of the world's knowledge" is; gatekeeping it in terms of breadth, depth and availability to however much of it makes AdSense. Which is already a whole lot of new useful stuff at your fingertips, sure. But when they said "organizing all of the world's knowledge" were they making any claims to the representativeness of the selection? No, they made the sure bet that it's not something the user would measure.
In fact, with this overwhelming amount of convincing non-experientially-backed knowledge being made available to everyone - not to mention the whole mass surveillance thing lol (smile, their AI will remember you forever) - what happens first and foremost is the individual becomes eminently marketable-to, way more deeply than over Teletext. Thinking they're able to independently make sense of all the available information, but instead falling prey to the most appealing narrative, not unlike a day trader getting a haircut on market day. And then one has to deal with even more people whose life is something someone sold to them, a race to the bottom in the commoditized activity (in the case of AI: language-based meaning-making).
But you didn't warn your parents about any of that or sit down and have a conversation about where it means things are headed. (For that matter, neither did they, even though presumably they've had their lives altered by the technological revolutions of their own day.) Instead, here you find yourself stepping in for that conversation to not happen among the public, either! "B-but it's obvious! G-get with it or get left behind!" So kind of you to advise me. Thankfully it's just what someone's paid for you to think. And that someone probably felt very productive paying big money for making people think the correct things, too, but opinions don't actually produce things do they? Even the ones that don't cost money to hold.
So if it's not about the productivity but about the obtaining of money to live, why not go extract that value from where it is, instead of breathing its informational exhaust? Oh, just because, figuratively speaking, it's always the banks have AIs that don't balk at "how to rob the bank"; and it's always we that don't. Figures, no? But they don't let you in the vault for being part of the firewall.
Would you say the same thing ("If it helped as much as its claimed, there wouldn't be any need to try and convince people they should be using it.") about the internet?
Thing's called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Next level to a MLM scheme: total bootstrap. Throwing shit at things in innate primate activity, use money to shift people's attention to a given thing for long enough and eventually they'll throw enough shit at the wall for something to stick. At which point it becomes something able to roll along with the market cycles.
Instead of this crypto-esque hand waving, maybe you can answer me now?
Also telling someone to "adapt to the times" is a bit silly. If it helped as much as its claimed, there wouldn't be any need to try and convince people they should be using it.
A LOT of parallels with crypto, which is still trying to find its killer app 16 years later.