Gosh I think I'll be a little sad about that future? I'm reminded of how we used to know really fun tricks for squeezing another bit of performance out of our assembly code -- "The Story of Mel" -- and then compilers started doing all the work for us.

The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".

It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.