I like the sentiment of the article; however this quote really rubs me the wrong way:
I’m not suggesting we abandon AI tools—that ship has sailed.
Why would that ship have sailed? No one is forcing you to use an LLM. If, as the article supposes, using an LLM is detrimental, and it’s possible to start having days where you don’t use an LLM, then what’s stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you’re not using an LLM at all?
I personally don’t interact with any LLMs, neither at work or at home, and I don’t have any issue getting work done. Yeah there was a decently long ramp-up period — maybe about 6 months — when I started on ny current project at work where it was more learning than doing; but now I feel like I know the codebase well enough to approach any problem I come up against. I’ve even debugged USB driver stuff, and, while it took a lot of research and reading USB specs, I was able to figure it out without any input from an LLM.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve never bought into the hype; I just don’t see how people have such a high respect for LLMs. I’m of the opinion that using an LLM has potential only as a truly last resort — and even then will likely not be useful.
I agree with this on a global scale; I was thinking about on a personal scale. In the context of the entire world, I do think the tools will be around for a long time before they ever fall out of use.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know many use cases of LLMs. I don’t use them, so I haven’t explored what they can do. As my experience is simply my own, I’m certain there are uses of LLMs that I hadn’t considered. I’m personally of the opinion that I won’t gain anything out of LLMs that I can’t get elsewhere; however, if a tool helps you more than any other method, then that tool could absolutely be useful.