With tools you know ahead of time that they will do the job you expect them to do with very high probability, or fail (with low probability) in some obvious way. With LLMs, there are few tasks you can trust them to do, and you also don't know their failure mode. They can fail yet report success. They work like neither humans nor tools.
An LLM behaves like a highly buggy compiler that too frequently reports success while emitting incorrect code. Not knowing where the bugs are, the only thing you can try to do is write the program in some equivalent way but with different syntax, hoping you won't trigger a bug. That is not a tool programmers often use. Learning to work with such a compiler is a skill, but it's unclear how transferable or lasting that skill is.
If LLMs advance as significantly and as quickly as some believe they will, it may be better to just wait for the buggy compiler to be fixed (or largely fixed). Presumably, much less skill will be required to achieve the same result that requires more skill today.
With tools you know ahead of time that they will do the job you expect them to do with very high probability, or fail (with low probability) in some obvious way. With LLMs, there are few tasks you can trust them to do, and you also don't know their failure mode. They can fail yet report success. They work like neither humans nor tools.
An LLM behaves like a highly buggy compiler that too frequently reports success while emitting incorrect code. Not knowing where the bugs are, the only thing you can try to do is write the program in some equivalent way but with different syntax, hoping you won't trigger a bug. That is not a tool programmers often use. Learning to work with such a compiler is a skill, but it's unclear how transferable or lasting that skill is.
If LLMs advance as significantly and as quickly as some believe they will, it may be better to just wait for the buggy compiler to be fixed (or largely fixed). Presumably, much less skill will be required to achieve the same result that requires more skill today.