I take a offence in the idea I’m “religiously downplaying LLMs”. I pay top dollar for access to the best models because I want the capabilities to be good / better. Just because I’m documenting my experience it doesn’t mean I have an Anti-ai agenda ? I pay because I find LLMs to be useful. Just not in the way suggested by the marketing teams.

I’m downplaying because I have honestly been burned by these tools when I’ve put trust in their ability to understand anything, provide a novel suggestion or even solve some basic bugs without causing other issues.?

I use all of the things you talk about extremely frequently and again, there is no “thinking” or consideration on display that suggests these things work like us, else why would we be having this conversation if they were ?