I’d say they’re a fundamental technology by now. Imagine how many people rely on them. And I’ve seen some heavy reliance.

my colleagues relying on it ruined the job for me and i quit. i became the debugging agent expected to constantly fix their half baked "it looks like it works" but doesn't nonsense

seriously, the idea we need this is a joke. people need it to pretend they can do their job. the rest of us enjoy having quick help from it. and we have done without it for a very long time already..

I’ve also seen heavy reliance on opioids and that didn’t turn out well.

Agree with you there. And that sorta is the kind of reliance I’m talking about. My friends will ask GPT to read restaurant menus for them lol

Unless one's job expectations have been altered to demand LLM-quantity output, how could someone be reliant upon these tools now? What were they doing two years ago (or maybe even six months ago)?

I can understand becoming reliant on a technology -- I expect most programmers today would be pretty lost with punch cards or line editors -- but LLM coding seems too new for true reliance to have formed yet...?