I really don't mean this in any negative way, but I find it fascinating the wide range of opinions and attitudes in this matter. I find it _so_ hard to imagine having this view myself.
The amount of things I've learned by asking very specific, technical questions to ChatGPT (mostly with web search turned on, but some times it's not even necessary) - things I can immediately verify and/or use, such as small bash commands/scripts, visualizations, diagrams. The value of that, alone, is certainly in the hundreds of dollars per month. Things I would never learn because they are buried somewhere among the 30 answers/comments, sometimes pointing to 20 more terribly-hard-to-read pages or manuals riddled with irrelevant (for my question) content, somewhere in the first page of web search results... maybe it's an attention span question? I certainly won't spend more than 10 minutes reading anything if not's interesting or required in the most extreme sense of the word way for my job (books on quantum mechanics, general relativity, topology, all fall in the former category - bash and pandas documentation fall in neither).
I'm convinced I've saved _at least_ low thousands per week by using coding assistants (mostly Claude Code in my case, but that's personal and likely to change at some point), as evidenced by the amount of work I'm able to finish, get paid for, and maintain. I'm not vibe coding, mind you - most of the time, I have an almost complete mental model of what I want after a couple of hours thinking, and the only thing left to do is type the code, at which point I'd, previously, feel bored, since the fun part (the thinking) is over.
Edit: I have 20 years of experience with code, 15 in the industry as a SWE (been coding since I was 13)
I have had no trouble finding solutions to coding problems by normal searches very quickly. The solution is typically right there in API documentation or one of the first few results.
But I suppose that answers how they may make LLMs profitable. They could cripple or even eliminate normal search until paying for LLMs is the only option.
I find it's either people being flippantly dismissive because it's something they've decided to make part of their personality and refuse to consume any information that may challenge their opinion, or they just massively lack imagination and creativity both on what it can do but also what it could do in 1, 5, or 20 years.
The amount of things I've learned by asking very specific, technical questions to ChatGPT (mostly with web search turned on, but some times it's not even necessary) - things I can immediately verify and/or use, such as small bash commands/scripts, visualizations, diagrams. The value of that, alone, is certainly in the hundreds of dollars per month. Things I would never learn because they are buried somewhere among the 30 answers/comments, sometimes pointing to 20 more terribly-hard-to-read pages or manuals riddled with irrelevant (for my question) content, somewhere in the first page of web search results... maybe it's an attention span question? I certainly won't spend more than 10 minutes reading anything if not's interesting or required in the most extreme sense of the word way for my job (books on quantum mechanics, general relativity, topology, all fall in the former category - bash and pandas documentation fall in neither).
I'm convinced I've saved _at least_ low thousands per week by using coding assistants (mostly Claude Code in my case, but that's personal and likely to change at some point), as evidenced by the amount of work I'm able to finish, get paid for, and maintain. I'm not vibe coding, mind you - most of the time, I have an almost complete mental model of what I want after a couple of hours thinking, and the only thing left to do is type the code, at which point I'd, previously, feel bored, since the fun part (the thinking) is over.
Edit: I have 20 years of experience with code, 15 in the industry as a SWE (been coding since I was 13)