> is precisely that the style of code it uses in the language I'm using puts out a lot of things I consider errors based on the "middle-of-the-road" code style that it has picked up from all the code it has ingested.

That is a really good point: the output you're gonna get is going to be mediocre, because it was trained (in aggregate) on mediocrity.

So the people who gush about LLMs were probably subpar programmers to start, and the ones that complain probably tend to be better-than-average, because who would be irritated by mediocrity?

And then you have to think about the long-term social effects: the more code the mediocrity machine puts out, the more mediocre code people are exposed to, and the more mediocre habits they'll pick up and normalize. IMHO, a lot of mediocrity comes from "growing up" in an environment with poor to mediocre norms. The next generation of seniors, who have more experience being LLM operators than writing code themselves, and probably more likely to get stuck in mediocrity.

I know someone's going to make an analogy to compilers to dismiss what I'm saying: but the thing about compilers is they are typically written by very talented and experienced people who've spent a lot of time carefully reasoning about how they behave in different scenarios. That's nothing like an LLM (just imagine how bad compilers would be if they were written by a bunch of mediocre developers from an outsourcing body shop, that's an LLM).