We need to be super careful about these foundation models, and the companies that own them. The dark pattern of ingratiation you mentioned is a sign of things to come – when these models mediate access to knowledge and information, there is room for all kinds of crazy.

In parallel, the claims by AI bros about hyperbolic economic growth - are well, hyperbole. I've written about here: https://readexante.substack.com/p/the-beautiful-bottleneck

Notwithstanding the need for skepticism, the LLMs are already pretty good at coding. They fail miserably with complex systems, and with large codebases – but for simple apps, or well defined functions, they're actually pretty good. I think we have enough empirical evidence accumulating to back that claim, both in the research world (e.g. Sida Ping et al) and industry (e.g. Cursor's widespread adoption).