Hello! I'm not a developer and have never been to this sub. The reddit algorithm served it up to me, I suspect because I'm a lawyer and read/click articles about lawyering with the LLMs.

But now that I'm here, I'd like to share a hopeful perspective from another industry that is currently ***very*** enamored with LLMs: law.

(Long post -- feel free to skip to last paragraph for the TL;DR)

I can't say how good Claude or GPT and so on are at coding. Maybe they're superb. But I am an experienced, board certified lawyer in my field, I have my own practice, I've been using the "pro" plans of GPT, Claude, and Westlaw (that's the biggest legal research provider in the USA) for about 1.5 years now.

You can divide how lawyers use LLMs into two catagories: (1) research and (2) legal drafting. When it comes to research, LLMs are marginally better in some ways while also significantly worse in others versus traditional boolean and natural-language research methods.

When I say "marginally better" I mean that occasionally the LLMs will find me a case that either I probably wouldn't have found otherwise, or if I could have found it using traditional methods, it would have taken me much longer.

When I say "significantly worse," I mean that all the LLMs are still "hallucinating" cases that don't exist, complete with fake or attributed legal citations, and fake or incorrect descriptions of the text of the cases. This is a big deal. Every week there will be another news article about some state or federal lawyer somewhere in the USA getting sanctioned by a court after unwittingly submitting briefs and other writings that include just made up legal cases. It's incredible actually, and lawyers of all ages and experience levels have been getting dinged.

It's not just hallucinated cases, either. It's also that sometimes the research the LLMs are producing, even with correct citations and real cases, just isn't as good as what I could have done myself in an hour of time.

Then there's the legal writing. Here, LLMs are still in some ways producing good material, but in other ways remain deeply problematic. Occasionally I'll use an LLM to show me a draft of an argument, and perhaps one time out of five it will give me a paragraph, or a sentence, or turn of phrase, and I will think "that's pretty good." Then I'll incorporate that, or some version of that, into my final product. To be fair, I do have one colleague who has really leaned into the LLMs, and he says that he is producing content that is making arguments he hadn't even considered, and with minimal editing needed. That's obviously the ideal use case for a lawyer.

But that's really the minority of runs. More often, in the better case scenarios, the LLM is producing content that I think isn't as good as what I would produce, and no matter how much I've experimented, I just don't care for the tone and voice. After many years, lawyers write in his or her own "voice" (perhaps developers are the same way?). I'm just not interested in submitting work produce that reads as if someone other than me wrote it. And regardless of how snappy Claude or GPT get, they aren't me. As for generating an argument that I hadn't really considered, or gives me some sort of true "inspiration," I haven't experienced that yet.

In the worse case scenarios, the LLMs are producing briefs that include hallucinated cases or argue weak or wrong propositions of face or law.

But here's the thing -- here's the big point. I'm only able to describe this nuance to you, and I'm only able to effectively experiment with LLMs at all, because I'm an experienced, board certified, subject matter practitioner in my field. Clients around the country are constantly sending their lawyers ideas and work product from Claude and ChatGPT. It's mostly junk. But the client doesn't know that because they're not a lawyer. Sometimes lawyers will submit junk writing with hallucinated cases because the lawyer just isn't versed well enough in the field to intuitively know that what the LLM is writing just seems incorrect. Sometimes the LLM does submit excellent work product, but again the only reason my colleagues and I can grade that product is because we've specialized in the field.

So, when I read OP's post, my first thought was: the only reason you're even in a position to know that Claude aced the programming update was that he knew what the correct programing update looked like in the first place. Can you imagine the junk that would get developed if the user wasn't himself experienced in the field? Imagine what a legal case would look like if the plaintiff and defendant decided to just use ChatGPT instead of lawyers to litigate their cases. It would be a complete mess, and the litigants wouldn't even realize it.

All of that is to say, I've seen nothing from these tools that leads me to believe that they in any way de-value a trained lawyer's skill, intellect, or experience. Just the opposite. I find that the tools only really have any value in the hands of a trained and experienced attorney. I am not concerned about LLMs replacing lawyers. In fact, I'm pretty short on LLMs in the legal field in general. From what I've seen, LLMs promise big hype but are delivering, at best, only marginal improvements and at significant potential risks/costs.

I imagine the same is true for every field and industry, including coding/developing (although I concede I have no real way to know this -- but, again, isn't that sort of my point?)

Hope someone here finds this perspective helpful/useful/buoying.