It’s definitely true that LLMs don’t live up to the hype of making everyone 10x faster, and possibly in the aggregate don’t even make anyone that much more productive, perhaps in many cases even reducing productivity overall.

My use of LLMs is often geared towards improving the quality of my work instead of going faster, though. Sharing a plan and having it point out things I may have failed to consider, having a LLM review a PR and possibly find issues human reviewers overlooked, create multiple HTML + CSS prototypes for a web UI so I can pick the best elements of each design instead of just going with one design I made myself, create and maintain a set of tests I might not otherwise have bothered with, etc.

Since in software engineering, quality is speed, using LLMs to improve quality can also improve speed.

Overall, using LLMs to expand your thinking instead of using them to think for you works pretty well, IMO.

In some respects, agreed, but in the sense that it can have both positive and negative effects, there are certainly precedents. The article mentions guns, for example. When wielding a gun, the natural mindset when someone pisses you off is, “I don’t need to take this bullshit—that mofo is about to get a bullet”. When you’ve got alcohol nearby, the inclination is to think, “I don’t need to suffer through these negative feelings—I can have a drink and make it go away”. When you’ve got a LLM, the natural inclination is to think, “I don’t need to do any tedious mental work—I can just let the machine do it”.

In all of these cases, it takes discipline to avoid the negative sides of the tool. I say this as someone who likes to drink, owns guns, and self-hosts open weight LLMs.