This seems like an overly reductive worldview. Do you really think there isn't genuine interest in LLM tools among developers? I absolutely agree there are people pushing AI in places where it is unneeded, but I have not found software development to be one of those areas. There are lots of people experimenting and hacking with LLMs because of genuine interest and perceived value.

At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't).

The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.

> No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people.

This is not correct, plenty of programmers are seeing value in these systems and use them regularly. I'm not really sure what's undemocratic about what's going on, but that seems beside the point, we're presumably mostly programmers here talking about the technical merits and downsides of an emerging tech.