They're borderline useless and certainly potentially inadvertently malicious for writing, customer service, speech to text, writing large amounts of complex code, therapy, medical diagnostics... the list goes on
Sounds like you're part of the problem?
It's really a serious problem just eroding the fabric of society in real-time. Being complacent in it or believing in the promise is just wholly foolish and bad for everyone.
It's been several years now of LLMs only appeasing those with low expectations and inexperience. Unless the only goal was generating boilerplate or really sloppy proofs of concept, LLMs are a waste time for everyone else. This argument is so over already. We're all just hoping for a soft landing when the hangover really kicks in.
What domain?
"Amish do not view technology as evil, and individuals may petition for acceptance of a particular technology in the local community" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_way_of_life#Use_of_moder...
See also https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-the-amish-let-technol... about some Amish use of cell phones with adapters to be more payphone/landline-like and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21349989 was a discussion about the use of pneumatic machinery by the Amish.
Maybe you forgot that important tidbit?
People are using them because they're being shoved down their throats and they're complacent.
Software quality, maintainability, exploitability, morale, competency are all at all-time lows and just worsening.
It's really bad to defend this.
Then they removed the approve everything manually mode and I thought, maybe I'm the one out of touch, I should try vibe coding. I gave it a big spec of things to implement and I was pretty vague on the details, but I was kind of hoping that the AI would get it right anyway.
I noticed that when you let the AI just do its thing, you spend a lot of time staring at the screen waiting for it to finish. No wonder all these people are obsessed with parallel agents.
Anyway, after a while it produced the end result and it was pretty bad and I don't even mean the code. This was with gpt 5.6 Terra. Definitively not the type of "did a week's worth of work in one hour" type of deal.
Meanwhile if you guide it with your own technical skills the end result is a tireless code generator that operates at 80% of the quality of your own code but is only roughly 1.5x to 2x faster than doing it yourself. The biggest multipliers come from making the AI do things humans don't want to do, like writing a bunch of thorough tests but those don't translate into increased productivity, the opposite in fact. They translate into higher software quality but if you vibe the tests and don't review them, even that disappears.
i'm a worse programmer now because of it
I'm sure someone will point out something like the 4-color theorem as a counterargument. Where is that kind of theorem proving in this generation of AI? We seem to have hit a dead end rather quickly.