> If you are an engineer, how often has an LLM told you (without you explicitly prompting for it): Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles. Pretty much never.

You have to ask for this. As in "I'm not sure about this approach due to X, Y, and Z. Can you think of something more elegant?" It works!

But also, how many people actually need to do the kind of "deep" work you're claiming LLMs can't do? Most people aren't contributing to the frontier of anything. I'm not.

Finally, I think you're appealing to a fuzzy distinction. The difference between a "genuinely new idea" and an idea that "combines existing ideas in a new way" just isn't very well defined. In retrospect, a lot of the most revolutionary idea look like a combination of many, smaller, prior ideas.