Sure, we went from 'writing software is a grueling effort for many people' to 'writing software is a solo effort with a few chatbot subscriptions' but I think that my colleagues in the IT world tend to overestimate the effects LLMs have had on the wider populace. Folks mostly use them as search engines and there hasn't been a qualitative change in their lives.

People keep talking about how we're going to enter some kind of positive feeback loop where the chatbots design better chatbot chassis but so far we've just started generating articles about that prediction at a higher rate. This is typical of the gains from LLMs: not a qualitative improvement, but a quantitative improvement. I'd sooner believe we're about to build a Paperclip Maximizer than a Singularity Machine.

There is a vast divide between knowledge workers and creatives when it comes to LLMs

The general populace sees mostly the creative’s view. The results are poor and it comes at the expense of ripping off IP and providing bad copies of it.

The pervasive argument right now doesn’t view LLMs as a tool that have more or less eliminated entire segments of knowledge workers, who had already been offshored and are now basically redundant. Every mid level programmer who copied and pasted stack overflow snippets all the way down to support techs are done.

You’re largely talking to people paid somewhere along the lines by all the AI equity that’s being raised.

AI has made making a demo easy and sometimes it’s might present more than a quick trip to wikipedia would surface. Edit: also it makes making mistakes in Excel easy(analysis).

Best give up all hopes of a future now.

> Sure, we went from 'writing software is a grueling effort for many people' to 'writing software is a solo effort with a few chatbot subscriptions'

But we haven't. The only kind of software you produce in the latter scenario is unmaintainable and full of flaws. It's not at all a replacement for a team of experts.

I think most people in tech, in particular SV live in such a huge bubble they are completely out of touch with the common person.

Then they stand there and say 'how come they can't see what I see? Hmm'.

Oh the answer is - inertia! Lets see how long they toe that line for.