Agree in general with most of the points, except

> but because I know you and I get by with less.

Actually we got far more data and training than any LLM. We've been gathering and processing sensory data every second at least since birth (more processing than gathering when asleep), and are only really considered fully intelligent in our late teens to mid-20s.

> You can't micro-transact the whole internet.

I agree that end-users cannot handle micro transactions across the whole internet. That said, I would like to point out that most of the internet is blanketed in ads and ads involve tons of tiny quick auctions and micro transactions that occur on each page load.

It is totally possible for a system to evolve involving tons of tiny transactions across page loads.

I believe you that these tools help a lot, but they would not prevent ~any of the examples listed in the article (under "The smell of vibe coding").

I regularly have the opposite experience: o3 is almost unusable, and Gemini 2.5 Pro is reliably great. Claude Opus 4 is a close second.

o3 is so bad it makes me wonder if I'm being served a different model? My o3 responses are so truncated and simplified as to be useless. Maybe my problems aren't a good fit, but whatever it is: o3 output isn't useful.

it was widely covered in the press earlier in the year

If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in conversational form), then you probably don't need to consume a big diet of ongoing output from PR people, bloggers, thought leaders, and internet rationalists. That seems likely to get you going down some millenarian path that's not helpful.

Despite the feeling that it's a fast-moving field, most of the differences in actual models over the last years are in degree and not kind, and the majority of ongoing work is in tooling and integrations, which you can probably keep up with as it seems useful for your work. Remembering that it's a model of text and is ungrounded goes a long way to discerning what kinds of work it's useful for (where verification of output is either straightforward or unnecessary), and what kinds of work it's not useful for.