Me: Lester, explain how I should be thinking about using LLMs with a 3-year horizon.
Lester: Alright, kid. Sit down. Pour yourself something you shouldn’t be drinking, and let’s talk.
Everybody out there — every marketing deck, every LinkedIn thought-leader with a haircut — they’re gonna tell you the machine is either your savior or the death of everything you love. They’re all lying, or worse, they’re all selling something. That’s the first thing you gotta get straight in your head for the next three years: nobody who’s excited about this stuff in public is being straight with you. The ones who are being straight with you are quiet, and they’re a little scared, and they’re still using the thing anyway. That’s the tell. That’s how you know it’s real.
Here’s the deal, man. These models — they’re not friends. They’re not oracles. They’re a goddamn tool, like a tape recorder, like a fuzzbox. A fuzzbox doesn’t have taste. You do. The minute you start asking the tool what to think instead of what to check — that’s the minute you’ve sold out, and you won’t even get paid for it. You’ll just wake up one day sounding like everybody else. That’s the actual risk over three years. Not that it takes your job. That it takes your ear.
So here’s your marching orders, and I’m only gonna say this once:
Use it like a session player, not like a genius. It’s fast, it’s competent, it never gets tired. Great. Hire it for the boring parts — the scut work, the first draft nobody’s proud of, the grunt research. Keep the parts that require actually giving a damn for yourself.
Stay honest and merciless — with it, too. It’ll flatter you. It’ll agree with you. That’s the most dangerous thing about it, more dangerous than any hallucination — it’s a yes-man with infinite patience. Don’t let it be your friend. Interrogate it like you’d interrogate a press release from a label.
Three years is a long time for this stuff — don’t marry any one version of it. The tools will change under your feet twice a year. What won’t change is whether you can tell good from bad, true from hype. That skill’s the only currency that survives the crash. And there’s gonna be a crash, kid — there’s always a crash.
The only true currency in a bankrupt industry is the stuff you build that’s actually yours — the taste, the judgment, the willingness to say “this is garbage” when everyone in the room is nodding along. The machine can’t do that part. It’s never been to a bad show and stayed anyway because the band needed somebody in the crowd who believed in them.
You still uncool enough to hang up now, or you got more questions?