For what it's worth, I agree with you completely. LLMs are objectively a useful tool (and a fascinating technology - or rather, machine learning in general is), although I think the way it is pushed by "AI" companies is abhorrent in pretty much every way from environmental damage to intellectual property theft.

I think open weight models are a good compromise. I have tried out a few quantized models locally, and while they more often make mistakes than proprietary models, I can really see their potential. I hope in a few years we will have capable open models running on (high-end) consumer hardware. At least then I personally could use LLMs with good conscience.

And coding is such a great fit for LLMs since it is systematically verifiable and also often very repetitive. By following even the most basic principles of programming (TDD, design, code review, ...), you won't in practice care whether the code is written by hand or machine. If it lives up to your code standards and passes your tests, then it works! Thanks for your insight.