A common refrain from the anti-LLM tech crowd is that LLMs aren't good at doing anything non-trivial. Well, is that really the case, or is it just harder and one needs to put in more practice for more complicated tasks?
I don't have an example off-hand, but I know that it's easy to dismiss something an LLM does as trivial if your own work is extremely marginal. Most devs aren't creating their own programming languages. I can't help but think people who hold this opinion also think the work most software professionals do is "trivial" — "you're just moving strings around, that's not impressive."
Everybody seems to want LLMs to be scissors, or at least to treat them as such. But the reason everyone can use scissors so well is because they've practiced with them, right? You're probably a lot better at using scissors now than the first time you did it, the functionality is just so simple it's harder to notice.
A lathe operator isn't any good if they don't frequently operate lathes.
So it raises a question of whether vast swathes of the population will be effective at using LLMs. Are they scissors, or a lathe?
To me learning to use LLMs is the same as doing anything else, you have to practice and put in the hours to get good. Maybe some harnesses will eventually allow LLMs to function more as scissors than lathes. This seems to be what Microsoft is trying to do by embedding Copilot in all their products and saying "choose the UI that works best for you".
If that doesn't end up working we'll need another paradigm for "non-technical" users to effectively operate computer assistants.
* * *