'Maybe cheap but not free' is a good observation.

If I'm getting paid for the work, I'm happy to leverage the LLMs so I can do more. If I'm paying for the work, I expect more from it.

For hobbyist stuff, where I'm not expecting to receive money? LLMs let me do things I otherwise wouldn't have done.

I've agreed with thoughts like "the LLM wrote the code, surely it's not worth sharing" or "I could just have the LLM write my own version of that". I'd also wondered about my own personal projects, surely "an LLM could have written all of this". -- But how I feel about that changes a bit based on how much it'd take the LLMs to get the same output.

Seconded on the "not cheap" argument here. I've spent $25 worth of tokens completing a one-week task in an afternoon, or rather my company spent the money. I would never have personally felt OK with throwing this much money after some prompting back and forth for a few hours, one lazy Saturday afternoon. I ran the risk of not finding the solution before the token usage would be too high for me to want to carry on, if I was my own credit card linked to the account.

Of course money in this situation is a bit of a funny measurement, right, because if I was able to take the rest of the week off as soon as I had solved the one-week problem, then I would have no problem at all throwing even $100 worth of tokens at it, so I could enjoy a nice 4-day "mini-vacation".

How cheap "cheap" is, is indeed "in the eye of the beholder".

I mostly agree, these are things that couldn't or weren't solved with abundant capital at all, and now they are being solved

it went from not having a price, to having one, and we are trying to retroactively transpose economic viability or economic existence to it from some parallel and prior time.