As pertaining to software development, I agree. I've been hearing accounting (online and from coworkers) of using LLMs to do deterministic stuff. And yet, instead of at least prompting once to "write a script to do X," they just keep prompting "do X" over and over again. Seems incredibly wasteful. It feels like there is this thought of "We are not making progress if we aren't getting the LLM to do everything. Having it write a script we can review and tweak is anti-progress." No one has said that outright, but it's a gut feeling (and it wouldn't surprise me if people have said this out loud).
I am one of these people. For my scripting needs, it would probably take me longer to find the script I saved rather than just asking it again and getting an answer in 15 seconds. I haven't saved a smallish script in a year.
I used to be one of those people, then I started saving these scripts in a folder and realized just how much time it saved me. Especially for nontrivial scripts which require a lot of typing or input specification.
This was me before LLMs. Had tons of scripts saved. I just don't see the point anymore "Take this list of users, remove from x group and reset their passwords" takes less time than trying to remember what I named that file and where it's saved. Anything that can be done in under 100 lines isn't worth saving anymore.
Honestly, one of the biggest gains for me with LLMs has been bash scripting. its so great.
especially if you have some saved in the same project and then you just tell it "look at the scripts in x and use that style"
Usually one would save this type of thing as a build tool task.
This is the 2025 equivalent of the people who once wrote 2000 word blog posts about how bad it was to use "cat" instead of just shell redirection.
These are hardly equivalent. One is someone preferring one deterministic way over another. The other is more akin to arguing that it's better to ask someone to manually complete a task for you instead of caching the instructions on your computer. Now if the LLM does caching then you have more of a point, I don't have enough experience there.