I do wonder how far away we are from an actual Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Three years ago I'd say we were 50 years away. Now it feels more like 10.
But when it comes to LLMs, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm asking deep, specific questions when it comes to programming and software, about things on the fringes that the LLM can't have read much about. In contrast, with things outside my area of expertise, I'm asking very superficial question that any practitioner of the field could answer, and so likely has many many sources for the LLM to pull information from.
With fields outside my area of expertise, I'm most often asking questions that are comparable to "what is a variable" or at most "how does A* search work". That gives me confidence that the quality of answers is likely to be much better with these questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
I think those agents could actually reason though. LLMs do not do any reasoning. They produce plausibly reasonable text.
2 + 2 = 4
2 + 2 = 4
Which of the above lines was generated by an LLM, and which was manually written by a human?
My coworkers were absolutely thrilled at my turnaround time. I was thrilled I didn’t have to do this boring task. I saw this as an absolute win.