This is one of the first somewhat-positive articles about LLMs that actually has a reasonable, if somewhat disturbing, conclusion.

This explains to me why I find them so useless - because the only two areas I've explored are ones I already have considerable competence in - while a lot of younger people like them.

I have long felt that the market for writing was already compromised by the Internet and a lot of suckers (like the one I see in the mirror) writing fairly high-quality prose for bubkis in compensation.

I am hoping - really really hoping - that my ability as a coder to get it completely right and easy to maintain will continue to earn me a living over lesser coders with LLMs, but who knows?

It's funny - I'm an SF reader for waaaaaay back, and up until as short as a decade ago I was an optimist about a lot of things in the future, but that all evaporated. I keep saying, "I don't see this working out well," and here I go again.

A lot of writing jobs are going to the same place that all those music jobs went to - the grave. Likely a lot of programming jobs will go, too.

Even for the few junior individuals who still have jobs, how will they get any better? Being shown the answer to a problem is nowhere near as effective in learning as working it through yourself.

And of course the big ethical and societal questions. The fact that a tiny number of incredibly wealth and powerful companies have eaten almost everyone's lunch, based on intellectual property that we freely gave to them - isn't this the second biggest heist in history? (The biggest one of course is our generations consuming the planet, leaving nothing for later generations except a blighted world.)