I'm (mildly) excited by LLMs because I love a new shiny tool that does appear to have quite some utility.
My analogy these days is a screwdriver. Let's ignore screw development for now.
The first screwdrivers, which we still use, are slotted and have a habit of slipping sideways and jumping (camming out). That's err before LLMs ... something ... something.
Fast forward and we have Philips and Pozi and electric drivers. Yes there were ratchet jobs, and I still have one but the cordless electric drilldriver is nearly as magical as the Dr Who sonic effort! That's your modern LLM that is.
Now a modern drilldriver can wrench your wrist if you are not careful and brace properly. A modern LLM will hallucinate like a nineties raver on ecstasy but if you listen carefully and phrase your prompts carefully and ignore the chomping teeth and keep them hydrated, you may get something remarkable out of the creature 8)
Now I only use Chat at the totally free level but I do run several on-prem models using ollama and llama.cpp (all compiled from source ... obviously).
I love a chat with the snappily named "Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_XL" but I'm well aware that it is like an old school Black and Decker off of the noughties and not like my modern De Walt wrist knackerers. I've still managed to get it to assist me to getting PowerDNS running with DNSSEC and LUA and configuring LACP and port channel/trunking and that on several switch brands.
You?