That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first <anything>.

People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said.

Technologies mature over time.

We actually don’t know whether or not meaningful performance gains with LLMs are available using current approaches, and we do know that there are hard physical limits to electricity generation. Yes, technologies mature over time. The history of most AI approaches since the 60s is a big breakthrough followed by diminishing returns. I have not seen any credible argument that this time is different.

There is a weird combination of "this is literal magic and everybody should be using them for everything immediately and the bosses can fire half their workforce and replace them with LLMs" and "well obviously the early technology will be barely functional but in the future it'll be amazing" in this thread.

The first car and first laptop were infinitely better than no car and no laptop. LLMs is like having a drunk junior developer, that's not an improvement at all.

We have been in the phase of diminishing returns for years with LLMs now. There is no more data to train them on. The hallucinations are baked in at a fundamental level and they have no ability to emulate "reasoning" past what's already in their training data. This is not a matter of opinion.