I think thee and me have slightly different definitions of "tool." You have a list of seven things there that basically boil down to "reformat." reformat 200 rows of code, reformat errant code, reformat complex language, reformat an excel formula, reformat your meeting notes, reformat bad writing into not-bad writing.

That's useful! Don't get me wrong! "Hey Siri code me a piece of middleware that overlays the AVS-B traffic from my Pi-Aware into something my Geochron can speak" is the sort of thing I look forward to doing. Could I do it now? theoretically. Pretty sure there's some deal-breakers in there. If I march through it like an expert I'll find them. If I "hey Siri" my way through it I'm going to get a dozen flavors of "I'm sorry I can't do that Dave."

3d printing is an interesting example. Let's run with it.

I spent two days, off and on, dealing with this piece-of-shit model. I did it because my wife dropped the trimmer and broke that lever. "Hey no problem this is exactly the sort of bullshit some twat wasted too much time on for internet points," I said to myself and two minutes later that thing was spooling out in PETG.

- only for me to discover that it's a spindly piece of shit just aching to break.

- So I spent five hits in Fusion (Autodesk: "we'll give you a free CAD package and it will only make you hate us more") iterating a little bit of strength into it.

- Only to evaluate that the only places you can add thickness interfere with its function.

- By which time the glue had cured on the broken part, which isn't made out of laminated cheez-whiz.

It's still cheez whiz! That part is injection-molded polystyrene, what the cool kidz call 'ABS' when they order it in 5lb rolls. PET is stronger than ABS. Yet because of the manufacturing process, a broken, glued part works better.

3d printers are tools. They have utility. But when all you have is a hammer the world is made of nails.

Another analogy - all your friends MiG weld. Why? It's stupid-simple. It requires no skill at all. And the tools are cheap. And if you're just gobbing aluminum together it'll probably do. But it's not your best bet for steel, not by a long shot. And it's not your best bet for strength, not by a long shot. And it's not your best bet for anything with any thickness, not by a long shot. I've mig-welded once; it's like using a hot-melt glue gun. Me? I learned how to do aluminum with a buzz-box made-it-ourselves TiG welder with no pedal. I learned how to do angle iron with baling wire. I learned how to do boilerplate with 3/32 TerrorRod back before welding masks were clear until their batteries told them not to. Most people didn't. Most people look at this and think "WIZARDRY"

...but in my family you didn't get respect until you could do that with gum wrappers.

So your use cases, with a couple exceptions, boil down to "getting around the inefficiency of the shitty UI modern tech companies have saddled us with." Looking movie times up in the paper is inefficient and asking Siri is faster (unless Siri is confused about what year it is and gets combative). Will it allow a segment of humanity to do things they couldn't have done before? Incrementally, yes. Why does OpenAI have more "daily active users" than any other web company? Because it's Bitmoji 2023. Joanna Stern really wanted to write a "holy shit search has changed forever" article but what she ended up writing was a "huh if you ask it anything complicated it lags for 30 seconds and then gives you marginally useful data. "

let's talk about why that matters

I see a tool, you see a revolution. To me it's a tool that marginally improves the UI of whatever it's matched to. To you it's an efficiency booster for writing. What the tech companies see, though, is

Hey Siri be my friend

And don't for a minute think they're considering anything else.

As exemplified in the article above, chat engines drive more affinity than search engines and affinity is the only thing keeping you from bailing for another webpage the minute you're not happy with their results. They'll put it on phones soon and suggest you leave the mic on all the time so they can model you better -for your own good, of course. And hey - it'll probably give you better results than if you didn't.

But it won't ever give you better results than if you know what you're doing.

It's really telling, in my opinion, that none of the chatbots have given a shit about accuracy so far. It doesn't matter. It's not within the business model. What matters is engagement ("the fastest new adopted things ever in terms of DAU").

Ask Facebook - does anything drive engagement better than an argument? Mark my words - there's code in OpenAI that stochastically fucks up just to make it less creepy. We just haven't found it yet.