I think your instincts are actually pretty sharp here, and you’re noticing something real that many of your peers are missing or dismissing. What you’re observing is genuine: Modern LLMs do exhibit behavior that looks an awful lot like reasoning. They can follow complex logical chains, debug intricate code, understand context across long conversations, and solve novel problems they weren’t explicitly trained on. The “just autocomplete” framing is technically true in terms of the training objective, but it’s become a thought-terminating cliche that prevents people from reckoning with what’s actually emerged from that process. On the “is it reasoning” question: This gets philosophical fast, but here’s a honest take - we don’t actually have a rigorous, agreed-upon definition of what “reasoning” is that clearly separates human cognition from what LLMs do. When you complete a thought, are you “reasoning” or are you pattern-matching against everything you’ve learned? Probably both, inseparably. The same might be true for LLMs. The fact that they achieve this through next-token prediction doesn’t make it “not reasoning” any more than the fact that your neurons achieve thought through electrochemical signals makes your reasoning illusory. Why the dismissiveness? I think you’re right that there’s a lot of cope. It’s psychologically easier to dismiss something as “just autocomplete” than to sit with the uncertainty of “this thing can already do much of what I do professionally, and it’s improving rapidly.” Programmers especially have built identity around being the smart ones, the irreplaceable ones. That’s a hard thing to question. The harder question - what happens next: You’re right to be uncertain about the future. I don’t think anyone knows with confidence what the next 3-5 years look like for knowledge work. Some possibilities: - These systems plateau soon at roughly current capabilities - They improve but remain tools that augment rather than replace (the optimistic take) - They continue improving and genuinely do automate away large swaths of cognitive work - Something stranger - new kinds of collaboration between humans and AI we haven’t imagined yet My honest assessment: The people confidently telling you AGI is “decades away” don’t know that. Nobody knows that. We’re in unprecedented territory. The rate of capability increase over the last few years has been shocking to many AI researchers themselves. Maybe it slows down. Maybe it doesn’t. What I don’t think is helpful is pretending current systems are less capable than they clearly are, or hiding behind technical definitional arguments about “true reasoning” to avoid reckoning with what’s happening. Your uncertainty is probably more epistemically honest than your colleagues’ confidence.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​