> At the end of your life, if all you've done are little half baked throwaway projects, you might look back and realize one day you never made anything of any particular significance, just thrashed around building stuff people had already done so many times before that some unthinking, unfeeling LLM can spit it out almost verbatim just so you can say "me too".

The big difference is, prior to LLMs, that you spent no money but gained something in the process of doing that little half-baked throwaway project.

Now, you spend some money, and get nothing in return.