In 2007, seeing the iPhone and owning a taxi company, you might think it was a good idea to make an app. After all, people need taxis when they are out and about. Maybe, you think, that people will stop using pay phones, so they won’t see the stickers you plastered there with your phone number.

So, you get Phone-a-Taxi made so that people can use an app to call you up. They tell you where they are and you send a cab. There are hardly any apps in the store, so you get a bunch of downloads and calls, and things look great. You are riding the smart phone hype wave.

And then Uber comes along.

That’s what a lot of LLM features feel like to me. Technically, they are using LLM technology, but mostly just trying to shoehorn chats and autocomplete into apps that were not designed around LLMs. Even GitHub Copilot is guilty of this. I love it, but in the end I still have the same amount of code I had before. I don’t even want code—I just want the program.

Like the Phone-a-Taxi app, they are still doing things the old way.