Turns out that even when an LLM does most of the brunt work you still need the guidance and steering of experienced engineers, who have no interest in selling their apps as being “made by ChatGPT”.

independently of whether the app is completely LLM generated or not, my point was more regarding the incredible distribution that ChatGPT offers and why it is not being taken advantage of.

one of the biggest problems of many consumer apps is convincing people to download it and give it a try. For many consumer apps like journaling, fitness tracking, nutrition, ... it seems that letting people use them where they are already spending a lot of time (i.e. ChatGPT) could be a great distribution advantage. Yet I could barely find any purely consumer ChatGPT apps and so I'm wondering what's missing. Any ideas?

To be fair, a lot of academic fields are such that anything at a Master's level or above requires serious competence to judge and for anyone below there's no distinction between what's right and what looks right.

I'm using it to write frontend code literally 5 times faster. What would have been a shell script is now a GUI backed by an API layer that doesn't require looking up internal documentation to know that it exists.

I've been using it to write tools that drastically facilitate spinning up local k8s cluster with an entire suite of development services that used to take two days to set up in Docker.

If it's useless that's a you problem. I've been building CRUDs that would have taken me a month to get perfectly right in the span of 4-5 days which save an enormous number of human tech support hours.

The software industry's value proposition for the vast majority of businesses running the world lies in CRUD apps that properly capture business requirements. That's infinitely more relevant in insurance, pharma, banking and logistics than any technological breakthrough of the past 25 years.

Your rant just shows you don't understand why people pay for software.

If you are using an LLM to actually fetch that data, combine it, and present it to you in an ad hoc way (like you run the same prompt every month or something), I wouldn't trust that at all. It still hallucinates, invents things and takes short cuts too often.

If you are using an LLM to create an application to grab data from heterogeneous sources, combine it and present it, that is much better, but could also basically be the excel spreadsheet they are describing.

Your knowledge of LLMs is outdated by at least a year. For the past three months at least my team has been one-shotting complex SQL queries that are as semantically correct as your ability to describe them.

And why do you diminish the skill of good data wrangling as if it weren’t the most valuable skill in the vast majority of computer programming jobs? Your cynicism doesn’t correspond with the current ground truth in LLM usage.

Well, that is still having the LLM write code which is more like my second scenario. I use SOTA LLMs for coding literally every day. I don't think my knowledge is "outdated by at least a year".

They have separate tanks for keeping water heated up to temperature wit a much smaller volume and don’t use saturated groups so the total hot mass is much smaller.

No, there’s organ donor lists for which billionaires get to skip the line.

These are not equivalent.

Democracies are not a guarantee of civil rights and easily turn into authoritarian and repressive regimes.

Usually only after they stop being democracies. It's rather difficult to repress people who can fire you if they don't like the job you're doing.

But in principle I agree, democracy on its own doesn't guarantee morality. There's such thing as the tyranny of the majority.

At my company I let Claude run in the background for a couple of hours and it found several backdoors and data exfiltration mechanisms.

It’s irrelevant to say “I could have found those myself”. I could have but I didn’t, and Claude did.

And what would have been the effect if those had been exploited?

In the real world a verbal description to start off a design from a template is _very much_ a competitive advantage.

I dabble in music production and having a DAW to help me guide some parts of the process would be extremely useful to get me out of certain creative ruts.