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.

They are not wrong.

The market, meant in a general sense, is stronger than any individual or groups of people. LLMs are here, and already demonstrate enough productive value to make them in high demand for objective reasons (vs. just as a speculation vehicle). They're not going away, nor is larger GenAI. It would take a collapse of technological civilization to turn the tide back now.

The market is a group of people.

And you are a collection of cells, but individual cells (mostly) don’t have the ability to dictate your actions

Yeah, but Jeff Bezos does actually have control over Amazon and can make decisions.

Jeff Bezos is a product of the system, not a driver of it. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, etc, are outputs, not inputs.

Their decisions are absolutely constrained by the system's values. They have zero agency in this, and are literally unable to imagine anything different.

What are you talking about? Of course they have agency. They're using that agency to funnel as much money as possible into their pockets, and away from other people, it's not that they can't imagine anything different, it's that when they do what they see is a world in which they're not as well off.