I think he has a useful line of thought here but should think about this more. The definition of a tool is a continuum. On the left are your bare hands, on the right, the presence of your neural will creates a perfect final product instantly.
Neither the LLM’s probabilism nor its presence unusually to the right here changes the definition of the continuum. Automation and tool are not orthogonal. Would we argue that a compiler or the JVM isn’t performing automation on the programmer’s behalf? Yet we literally call it a member of a toolchain.
His point stands about the hazards, the definition argument less so.
Apologies Rich but I use LLMs to write Clojure. IMHO it maximizes token spend efficiency and economics by focusing on domain logic rather than boilerplate.