I do not understand small engines, but I would've thrown away a perfectly good honda 4 stroke this summer if I didn't have an LLM to help me with the diagnosis.

(And I only reached for the LLM after working through all the flowcharts and tables in the shop manual, reading relevant parts of two engine repair books, and watching a bunch of youtube videos.)

It's especially awesome in domains where:

1. you personally don't have the time to learn,

2. you can trivially evaluate the output ("does engine go brrrrrr or brr-splaugh-crunch"), and

3. there are no bad outcomes; or, there are bad outcomes (destroy engine, hurt myself) but you can augment with ground-truth ("do X as suggested by nlp machine but follow shop manual for doing X").

It was a 3B or 8B model too, so I probably burned more energy on unnecessary oil changes than on running the llm inference.

Say what you will about LLMs, and dear god can the claude-style harness outputs be annoying in the workplace. But they're great tools for accelerating the sorts of ultra-narrow-path learning curves that commonly pop up in tinkering/hacking/similar sorts of activities.

(Also, people without critical thinking skills believing everything they read pre-dates LLMs by thousands of years. This was a widely discussed problem with popular media consumption in the USA during the several years preceding the invention and popularization of LLMs (say 2015 to 2021). There's a different, more fundamental educational diagnosis for that problem, which LLMs may exacerbate, but which they did not cause and cannot cure.)