> The assumption you make is the classic LLM mistake of thinking writing code === building software.
Not quite. I'd agree with you if you try to do code generation in one-shot, but the agentic loop importantly isn't that. Natural testing at-scale is automated as well.
> but don’t be fooled into thinking anyone can, or should with every side project.
You're right, and I hoped I had conveyed that but I guess I didn't. I'm very bearish on whether or not we're democratizing anything. What I do think is we have a very complicated and interesting tool, and within a reasonable precondition of additional scaling and structural innovation, one that promises a certain kind of person the ability to swing with the weight of an entire institution.
I have been playing around with transformers for 7 years now, and can see and qualify the improvements observationally. Innovations like thinking blocks, the agentic loop, the many architectural refinements flourishing, SAEs, steering vectors, harnesses, etc. Despite what it sounds like, I've yet to incorporate LLMs into any of my professional workflows, they're really not quite up to my standards yet. But then, in my industry I would never in a million years touch anything like SQLite either. Those kinds of things are very taboo for anything but like an internet service and that's more the kind of operations drek that gets shoved off to the IT department. All of this colors my perspective. I was never pulling in dependencies. In the future, it's looking like I'll have infinitely less reason to.