I've told a number of people that large language models are essentially Clever Hans as a service. These transformers are taking a prompting by the user, and then producing a chain of the most likely tokens to satisfy said prompt. Which is to say, they will (unless altered by "safety" filters like the commercial offerings) simply tell you what you want to hear. Early versions of these models like tay.ai made this abundantly clear, as it was (and remains) trivial to find prompts that the most natural response to would be Sieg Heil! This has made them the perfect parasocial companion, and a number of firms are making a killing running hog butchering scams with these language models, as predicted by my prior post on the subject.

So should you be worried about your job? Sure, supposing you are a glad-handing empty suit, or a vapid hand-holder. Pretty much all of the talentless power junkies and people who want to play house could be replaced tomorrow with these mindless algorithms and I doubt anyone would notice. I suspect some of the more clever of them are already automating their jobs via these tools so they can moonlight and double-dip.

Those of us who live in O-Ring world where being right and making mistakes very rarely matters, the LLMs fall flat on their face. 3/4 of Github copilot suggestions are immediately discarded by senior programmers, and more prompting is required.

This is like working with a newbie programmer who's thick as a brick; your time would be better spent fixing it yourself and moving on. It does however shine when used by said newbies; that's the silver lining to this cloud. LLMs are great at telling the young bucks what the more experienced programmers want to see. The primary productivity gain here will be using such on-ramps to distract the able less with LMGTFY-tier requests by the noobs. This is a genuine improvement on the current state of affairs, as most of the unskilled labor coming into the field has no idea what magic words to even start querying an indexer for. They'll probably spend more time torturing information out of LLMs than they would an experienced dev, but clever hans is paid with carrots.