Jev's marketing can't be that good because as a dev I was thoroughly unimpressed by it. Isn't it just structured output? If you embed LLMs in your applications, you're almost certainly using structured outputs. Maybe they did additional training on top of some open Chinese model, but almost always this makes things worse not better. There's no way it's better than a 5-5 series Claude model.

This might not be accurate but this is my impression from whatever I've heard of Jev.

>many people were only familiar with LLMs as the generic AI tool for everything

That’s exactly how the biggest vendors have been marketing them, it’s no wonder non-experts think of them that way. I’m not an expert myself but have a passing familiarity with theory as a SWE and grad student who did some research for machine translation and currently am in a computing-adjacent field. I use LLMs heavily for work and have never come across any coder-oriented tutorial, guide, etc. encouraging use of LLMs as decision models specifically, even if they are being used that way “beneath the hood.” Jev’s announcement seemed sort of new functionality to me but even in the first post about it on HN (where I heard about it), iirc people were pointing out that LLMs do the same thing, at least to some extent.

I think you have a very narrow and specific experience with people claiming to be "devs".

I don't know of any devs in real life who would loudly and publicly get excited about anything unless it was their own completed project to show off.

The tools are a footnote. It's precisely because it's so hard to get a project that far along that they would be familiar with many more tools than they would ever speak about. I suppose some people have a low bar. I wouldn't really call them "devs", especially now in this "AI era".