Time, effort, and skill being equal, I would suggest that AI access generally improves the quality of any given output. The issue is that AI use is only externally identifiable when at least one of those inputs is low, which makes it easy to develop poor heuristics.
No one finds AI-assisted prose/code/ideas boring, per se. They find bad prose/code/ideas boring. "AI makes you boring" is this generation's version of complaining about typing or cellular phones. AI is just a tool; it's up to humans how to use it.
This reminds me of the time I printed a poster with a blown up version of some image for a high school history project. A classmate asked how I did it, so I started going on about how I used software to vectorize the image. Turned out he didn't care about any of that and just wanted the name of the print shop.
It's high-interest to me because open models are the ultimate backstop. If the SOTA hosted models all suddenly blow up or ban me, open models mitigate the consequence from "catastrophe" to "no more than six to nine months of regression". The idea that I could run a ~GPT-5-class model on my own hardware (given sufficient capex) or cloud hardware under my control is awesome.
YMMV, but I've found that I actually do way more of that type of "thinking hard" thanks to LLMs. With the menial parts largely off my plate, my attention has been freed up to focus on a higher density of hard problems, which I find a lot more enjoyable.
Yup, there is a surprisingly high amount of boilerplate in programming, and LLMs definitely can remove this and let you focus on the more important problems. For a person with a day job, working on side projects actually became fun with LLMs again, even with the limitation of free time and mental energy to invest in.
The way I summed it up to a friend recently is that Gemini 3 is smarter but Grok 4 works harder. Very loose approximation, but roughly maps to my experience. Both are extremely useful (as is GPT-5.2), but I use them on different tasks and sometimes need to manage them a bit differently.
After a certain point, someone else's insistence on self-harm ceases to be a good excuse to infringe on my freedom. We don't ban hammers because some people accidentally damage their property/body, and it's a lot easier to do that with a hammer than an unlocked bootloader.
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