Comment by lxe

Your defense of the contrarian framing feels like it's missing the point. What you're describing as "counterintuitive" is actually pretty standard for anyone who's been working deeply with LLMs for a while.

Most experienced LLM users already know about temperature controls and API access - that's not some secret knowledge. Many use both the public vanilla frontends and specialized interfaces (various HF workflows, custom setups, sillytavern, oobabooga (̵r̵i̵p̵)̵, ollama, lmstudio, etc) depending on the task.

Your dismissal of LLMs for writing comes across as someone who scratched the surface and gave up. There's an entire ecosystem of techniques for effectively using LLMs to assist writing without replacing it - from ideation to restructuring to getting unstuck on specific sections.

Throughout the article, you seem to dismiss tools and approaches after only minimal exploration. The depth and nuance that would be evident to anyone who's been integrating these tools into their workflow for the past couple years is missing.

Being honest about your experiences is valuable, but framing basic observations as contrarian insights isn't counterintuitive - it's just incomplete.