> Experts don’t follow the rules, they make the rules.

No. Most rules are there before and will stay after the expert enter the field within its career path, unless the field is bright new territory no one fooled before, which is rare.

Not only experts have to know the rules, otherwise they wouldn’t be expert, but good experts also ideally know why the rules were set, and at least have a fairly well aligned representation of what it would likely lead to to follow or not each rule in this or that situation, which rules are in conflicts and what the tradeoffs are when favoring one on the other.

Everything is context dependant, yes. And LLMs can help to leverage on far wider contexts that a single individual would be able to do on its own. It’s require interest to reach some goal in some social context, and not everyone will use LLMs with the same creativity.

This week-end I was discussing with a friend about our respective use of LLMs. At some point they told me they no longer read the MR, as LLMs can also do great job on that matter now, which is in sharp contrast with what I do. Not that I don’t auto-review with LLMs, but I use that as a first step, be it mine or some other colleague. And then I ask an LLM to prepare me a reading plan to check the MR, taking into account the activity scope and the implementation architecture. To me it was an obvious way to go, but for them it was something they never considered. That’s random sample, of course they would certainly be cases we would switch the "I wouldn’t have thought about it" role.

So yes, LLMs can be used to produce faster giant piles of unmaintainable codebases. Or they can be used to strengthen processes that lead to code quality. The nail won’t prevent us to knock our thumb, to use a nail in reverse side, or to smash our coworker.

I get the paperclip plant issue, but that’s some extreme scenario (which is of course the point of the allegory), and most bad uses will be far more mundane in how they look and what the consequences are. And most good uses will look more and more transparent to users to the point they won’t even wonder about it at each use. Like, most people open the tap, see water fall and they don’t get a sense of wonder, not giving a thought to this masterpiece of engineering and gratitude for all people that works daily in the shadow for this miracle to happen. They don’t leave the toilets thinking "how freaking amazing such a complex system of wastewater is something I can benefit from everyday, unlike so many other of the 100G humans that walked this earth."

Next time you go to WC or tap some water, think about it.