I agree. I use LLMs heavily for gruntwork development tasks (porting shell scripts to Ansible is an example of something I just applied them to). For these purposes, it works well. LLMs excel in situations where you need repetitive, simple adjustments on a large scale. IE: swap every postgres insert query, with the corresponding mysql insert query.
A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pattern:
1. Someone gets an idea, like feeding papers into an LLM, and asks it to do something beyond its scope and proper use-case.
2. The LLM, predictably, fails.
3. Users declare not that they misused the tool, but that the tool itself is fundamentally corrupted.
It in my mind is no different to the steam roller being invented, and people remaking how well it flattens asphalt. Then a vocal group trying to use this flattening device to iron clothing in bulk, and declaring steamrollers useless when it fails at this task.
A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pattern:
1. Someone gets an idea, like feeding papers into an LLM, and asks it to do something beyond its scope and proper use-case.
2. The LLM, predictably, fails.
3. Users declare not that they misused the tool, but that the tool itself is fundamentally corrupted.
It in my mind is no different to the steam roller being invented, and people remaking how well it flattens asphalt. Then a vocal group trying to use this flattening device to iron clothing in bulk, and declaring steamrollers useless when it fails at this task.