Good tools have many properties LLMs lack - they are predictable, reliable, deterministic, of bounded function, hopefully simple etc.

These are all things that LLMs have but are typically stripped or hand-waved away for the sake of convenience or ease of use.

Predictability? Reliability? Deterministic, bounded function? The same seed pushed through a model's weights ends with the same output. You can change the behavior for how the weights are processed, what tokens are more important than others, etc.

Simple they are not and likely won't be, but most models are way more controllable than most people realize. The problem is the thing that makes them interesting in novel isn't what we can control about them, it's about what's not controlled. The fact that they can produce seemingly novel information is the thing everyone wants to sell, and what everyone thinks they want to buy.

AI (in as far as an LLM is concerned) is a tool being sold, bought, and discussed as if it was something more than what it is, and articles like this don't help the fantasification and anthropomorphization of them.

While Rich is absolutely correct that LLMs are a form of automation, I'd hazard to guess that his experience with programming is rather different from that of most software developers. Rich works on developing his own language where most of the work he does is novel and interesting, almost by definition.

However, the elephant in the room is that code mot people write day to day is rote and repetitive. Any given application will have to do some IO to talk to the filesystem, services, or a database, It's going to need some service endpoints to expose its functionality. It might have a UI with some menus and buttons, it probably needs to do auth, and so on. It's all just boilerplate that you have to write over and over.

This can be fun and exciting at the start of your career when you're just learning how these things work, and you're doing them for the first time. But once you've written enough of these things, it just becomes a chore that provides no intellectual stimulation. And this is precisely the kind of code that is ripe for automation. I don't care to be intimately familiar with every line of code that goes into making a button or reading a record from a database. I'm perfectly happy to have this tedious work automated so I can focus on things that are interesting to me.

It seems to me that a lot of people create a dichotomy where you either use LLMs and farm off all your thinking to them, or you're doing everything by hand artisanally. The reality is that you can reach for LLMs for things that don't interest you but need to be done nonetheless, and spend your time learning and understanding things that you see value in.