I don't want an LLM to generate "the answer" for me in a lot of places, but I do think it's amazing for helping me gather information (and cite where that information came from) and pointers in directions to look. A search engine that generates a concrete answer via LLM is (mostly) useless to me. One that gives me an answer and then links to the facts it used to generate that answer is _very_ useful.

It's the same way with programming. It's great helping you find what you need. But it needs to be in a way that you can verify it's right; or take it's answer and adjust it to what you actually need (based on the context it provides).

Maybe. My sense if we'd need to see 3 to 4 orders of magnitude improvements on the current models before we can replace people outright.

I do think we'll see a huge productivity boost per developer over the next few years. Some companies will use that to increase their throughput, and some will use it to reduce overhead.