The ability to spin up a single page tool for converting timestamps or counting tokens or analyzing a few hardcoded weasel words is handy: nobody disputes that. But that is not the work most of us do.

In the real world, away from those whose salary depends on marketing these agentic tools, an LLM is a context shredder. It provides plausible code snippets that are globally incoherent and don't fit style. CONVENTIONS and RULES files are a kludge, a sloppy hack.

These tools flatten the deep, interconnected knowledge required to work on complex systems into a series of shallow, transactional loops that pretend to satisfy the user.

The skill being diminished is not the ability to write a single-page utility or single-purpose script. It is the ability to build and maintain a mental model of a complex machine. The ability to churn out a hundred disparate toy tools is not evidence of a superior learning method, it is evidence of a tool that excels at tasks with no deep interconnected context.

Please, please tell me how I can hold an LLM correctly. My requirements are: it doesn't tell me anything that it's hallucinated, or which is factually incorrect. That's it. That's the only requirement.