Somewhere in the past year an LLM became my thinking partner,

That statement terrifies me, I very seldom use LLMs, maybe one question in a month, and that question is usually when I have exhausted the other alternatives.

Example, last week I attended an airshow and needed to program my radio scanner to a local radiostation where they rebroadcast the announcer to enable you to hear it clearly rather than through the annoying speakers.

And I just could not get my Icom IC-R6 to work, it would randomly change radio modes as I was tuning, I also had trouble setting the tuning steps correctly.

I read the manual, but I could not figure it out, so I caved and asked chatgpt, and got the help I needed in quick order.

I am certain that I would have figured it out on my own, but it would have taken far longer.

Anyway, I am always careful to limit my interaction with LLMs/AI as I start feeling my skills stagnating and even reducing as I use it.