LLM Inevitabilism

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.

You can fight against the current of society or you can swim in the direction it's pulling you. If you want to fight against it, you can, but you shouldn't expect others to. For some, they can see that it's inevitable because the strength of the movement is greater than the resistance.

It's fair enough to say "you can change the future", but sometimes you can't. You don't have the resources, and often, the will.

The internet was the future, we saw it, some didn't. Cryptocurrencies are the future, some see it, some don't. And using AI is the future too.

Are LLMs the endpoint? Obviously not. But they'll keep getting better, marginally, until there's a breakthrough, or a change, and they'll advance further.

But they won't be going away.