How is it solved? LLMs cannot think new things, they can only cobble something together if it's in their training set.

Software isn't solved. 'Coding' is, according to the people of Claude.

Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering. There's other parts AI isn't doing, such as understanding and refining requirements, and delivery + accountability.

Why is it bittersweet? Carpenters probably didn't cry when their tools improved.

It will be bittersweet when there's no human needed at the wheel but IMHO we are far, far from that. These models/agents are just mimicking human text and need guidance because they often get lost or stuck.

This reminds me of the Go champion who announced he was giving up the game after a computer beat him.

It’s as if a runner were to give up running when beaten by a horse or a car. It suggests they may have had unexamined and perhaps somewhat strange reasons for doing the activity in the first place.

People have difficulty accepting just how significant their limitations actually are. We design our world to hide those limitations. As an example, it would be easy to make computer games that are unwinnable by humans because of our slow reaction times, low speed in general, and our cognitive limitations. But no-one makes such games, because few people would want to play them for very long.

The “terrible cost” in this specific case seems to be related to discovering that we were fooling ourselves about how good we were at software development.

The cost is not terrible, calm down.