I've been doing this for a couple decades. I don't wonder how people did it before AI, I did it for years and years before any of this existed...

> What I found with LLM usage is that people will settle on the first one, declaring it good enough, and not exploring further (because that is tedious for them).

I don't relate to this at all. It's so much easier (and less tedious) to experiment and iterate now. I see people doing a lot more of it, not less.

AI tools are also excellent aids to all the other types of problems you elucidated. You're doing theorycraft, and I might even agree with you if I just sat down and theorycrafted out how I thought this would work for each type of problem as you're doing here. (Indeed, you can probably find HN comments I made in 2022 and 2023 that say very similar things as you're saying!)

But in practice, I find all your theories here about why AI tools are not useful in this or that case to just be totally wrong.