This year I went from having not a single subscription to paying for ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, and Grok. My usage of these tools makes it well worth it, according to “Your Year with ChatGPT” I’m in the top 1% of users for the number of ChatGPT messages sent for 2025. I’ve been looking for a replacement to Google search for years, and I’ve finally found it.
The LLM tools are just as inaccurate as what you’d find on a typical Google search result page, but they are much more convenient. I fundamentally view them as information retrieval tools, and I trash at least half of what is returned. This isn’t different than how search worked before, a topic requiring many searches before returning that golden page. The convenience of tools like Cursor, that fit the results directly into the target documents, is huge. It’s like having an always-on-intern that has no direction and makes mistakes, but is good at completing simple tasks.
People have been dooming how this will impact beginner programmers. I’m not worried, anyone who relies on LLMs will quickly realize that LLMs get stuck in loops of mistakes. It’s just a matter of how long it takes the person to learn the loop must be broken.
I’m not sure which stage of LLM progression crystalized it for me, but 2025 was the year I got my artificial intern.
