I use LLMs a huge amount in my work as a senior software engineer to flesh out the background information required to make my actual contributions understandable to those without the same background as me. eg, if I want to write a proposal on using SLO's and error budgets to make data driven decisions about which errors need addressing and which don't, inside a hybrid kubernetes and serverless environment, I could do a few things:
* Not provide background information and let people figure it out for themselves. This will not help me achieve my goals.
* Link them to Google's SRE book and hope they read it. Still not achieving my goals, because they won't.
* Spend 3 hours writing the relevant background information out for them to read as part of my proposal. This will achieve my goals, but take an extra 3 hours.
* Tell the LLM what I'm looking for and why, then let it write it for me in 2 minutes, instead of 3 hours. I can check it over, make sure it's got everything, refine it a little, and I've still saved 2.5 hours.
So for me, I think the author has missed a primary reason people use LLMs. It saves a bunch of time.
For a teacher, they want to see you spend those 3h to see what you come up with, and if there's something they should direct your attention to, or something they should change in their instruction.
But ultimately, getting the concise summary for a complex topic (like SLIs and SLOs are) is brilliant, but would be even better if it was full of back-links to deeper dives around the Internet and the SRE book.
* Not provide background information and let people figure it out for themselves. This will not help me achieve my goals.
* Link them to Google's SRE book and hope they read it. Still not achieving my goals, because they won't.
* Spend 3 hours writing the relevant background information out for them to read as part of my proposal. This will achieve my goals, but take an extra 3 hours.
* Tell the LLM what I'm looking for and why, then let it write it for me in 2 minutes, instead of 3 hours. I can check it over, make sure it's got everything, refine it a little, and I've still saved 2.5 hours.
So for me, I think the author has missed a primary reason people use LLMs. It saves a bunch of time.