When I encounter people who don't use these tools it feels more like talking to someone without a computer who is trying to convince you that you don't need one back in the 90s. Or someone being like "the internet is useless" back in 1995. I mean early days it was kinda like that. The early internet for normies was almost entirely useless.

The change has been so rapid that I think a lot of people are having a hard time I guess wrapping their head about the lived experience of it. For a while my only access to the tools was through work. Then I ended up getting a $20/month ChatGPT account and that comes with codex and now I can't imagine sitting there Googling a problem anymore. It literally feels low tech these days. Big "I'm not paying for Cable, the antenna is good enough" energy. It saves me soooooo much time just maintaining my own local stuff. I mean it literally saves me hours and hours of personal labor.

The local models will 100% catch up. Most likely the inference I use now will be free in five years across the board and you'll be buying a cyberdeck or something with a 128G of RAM and an LLM friendly bus architecture.