This is both true and not.

It's true that in a project, a novel idea undeclared as such will be shaved off quietly by an llm. You really need to be explicit about wanting to keep it.

You will get pushed into the mean.

However, I'd say 90% of making something (that is useful) is repeating the old thing. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Or at least we should. Getting there can be difficult for most of us.

I say this as someone who chronically re-invents things. I then later get stuck and find someone already thought through my problem and solved it better.

I don't believe being unique in all the ways is useful. You need to be unique in the important ways and not unique in the other places.

There's also a cultural coherence angle that (my) unique things often fail at. Stuff has to look like other stuff enough for people to understand intuitively what it is and how it works. Here the mean is your friend.

I am able to explore more unique spaces because I no longer deal with the minutia of getting the things that should be the same correct. So paradoxically, this has made my output more unique.

> However, I'd say 90% of making something (that is useful) is repeating the old thing.

The entire point of software engineering is to make repetition unnecessary so people can focus on the new.

LLMs are pushing the people that use them into the worst possible set of practices.