Technology

a tool for a human to use

Agree

the tasks it’s good at weren’t large bottlenecks to begin with.

Disagree. There are plenty of tasks it is being tried with which it's not good at, but to an extent you don't know that until you've tried.

I use LLMs for code review, they help - a lot. Like so many new technology applications, we just didn't do code review at anything like the level that LLMs enable doing it at, with LLMs we're doing more of what we "always wished we had the time / attention span for" but never actually did, in practice. LLMs are lowering the total cost of finding issues in code, making the reward of doing them in depth worth the cost. In the past we'd do a much higher level review, and miss a lot of detail issues, but the cost of finding those detail issues without LLMs was very high and for the most part we deemed the detail issues "not worth the cost to find." Using LLMs for code review is actually making more work than we used to put into code reviews, but the returns are there - worthwhile.

You might think of it like finite element analysis for mechanical design. Sure, that was possible with paper drawings and slide rules, but it wasn't worth the cost using those tools. Now, there are areas of mechanical design where FEA modeling is the standard practice - if you don't do it you're considered to be slacking, not applying state of the art tools to the job.

There are some things that I find LLMs to be horrible at - like 3D drawings in Blender. However, they are actually really good at making specialized Blender usage tutorials to make it easier / faster for human artists to learn how to use the tool themselves - and once in awhile they can whip up a very helpful python script to automate something that would have been tedious / time consuming to do over and over but not quite worth learning python and the APIs to automate.