>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning.

Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on AI capabilities. So it might be that if there is any value in human labor left in the future it will be in being able to get AI models to do what you want correctly.

Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai.

I think the same effect has been around forever in the form of every boss/manager/ceo/rando-divorcee-or-child-with-money using employees to do their thinking as a current information-handling worker or student using an ai to do their thinking.

That would be true if several conditions were fulfilled, starting with LLMs being actually to do their tasks properly, which they still very much struggle with which basically defeats the premise of moving up an abstraction layer if you have to constantly check and correct the lower layer.

I remember this exact discussion (and exact situation) with WYSIWYG UI design tools.

They were still useful, and did solve a significant portion of user problems.

They also created even more problems, and no one really went out of work long term because of them.

This reads to me as extremely defensive.

I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer; I take it that he is trying to get people to be mindful of the current AI tooling and its capabilities, and that there is more to do before we say it is what it is being marketed as. Like, GPT5 seems to be an additional feature layer of game theory examples. Check LinkedIn for how people think it behaves, and you can see patterns. But they market it as much more.

Agree with this.

I mean the guy assembling a thingymajig in the factory, after a few years, can put it together with his hands 10x faster than the actual thingymajig designer. He'll tell you apply some more glue here and less glue there (it's probably slightly better, but immaterial really). However, he probably couldn't tell you what the fault tolerance of the item is, the designer can do that. We still outsource manufacturing to the guy in the factory regardless.

We just have to get better at identifying risks with using the LLMs doing the grunt work and get better in mitigating them. As you say, abstracted.

Really? No signs of slowing down?

A year or two ago when LLMs popped on the scene my coworkers would say "Look at how great this is, I can generate test cases".

Now my coworkers are saying "I can still generate test cases! And if I'm _really pacificcccc_, I can get it to generate small functions too!".

It seems to have slowed down considerably, but maybe that's just me.

LLMs are plateauing, and you’re in denial.

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