This is a change that's been happening gradually over time-- I don't think I could have done this on a local model that could run on a consumer class gpu a couple months ago.

There are plenty of other uses that people have been making for a long time-- e.g. I know someone who uses a fine tuned local model to sort their incoming email and scan their outgoing messages for accidental privacy leaks.

I don't agree with your assessment on an opportunity lost-- I got my reps in on the original work, the AI gave an incremental step forward which made the whole exercise somewhat more valuable to me with minimal additional cost. I think this improves the cost vs benefit in a way that makes me more likely to try other pointless activities, knowing that when I run out of gas I can toss it to AI to try some variations.

Sometimes you're also 27 steps deep on a nested subproblem and you're really just trying to solve sometime. Even in finr craftsmanship not every step needs to be about maximum craftsmanship. :) Sometimes it's just good to get something done.

I think this is much like any other tool. One can carve furniture using only hand tools, but the benefits of a router are hard to dispute. Both approaches exist in the world and sometimes both are used in concert.

As far as people frying their brains with AI -- you don't need local models for that, plenty of people are driving themselves into deep personally and socially destructive delusion just using the chat interfaces.