A frame from my friend Dimitri: "LLMs as spackle for toil."

Toil is the tasks that are just barely complex enough that they can't be fully automated, but are also soul-crushingly banal for the humans who have to execute them.

The amount of human ingenuity that is poured into this crank-turning is huge--a force that is everywhere and mundane and hidden.

But what happens when everyone gets this dirt-cheap spackle? The bar of what can be automated will shift.

It's totally conceivable that people everywhere will be empowered to make not even situated "software" but situated solutions: hacky and ugly, but perfectly situated to their particular bespoke niche, empowering their creator to spend their ingenuity on more levered things.

But even if everyone did a ton of this spackle for toil, it's the kind of thing that you might conceivably miss at the society level, because there would be no concentration of a big, obvious, prominent thing... it would just be a tsunami of little mundane hidden improvements everywhere.