Interesting: At first I was objecting in my mind ("Clearly, the magic - LLMs - can create effect instead of only revealing it.") but upon further reflecting on this, maybe you're right:
First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us.
Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal development" when interacting with an LLM.
(There's even something to be said about prompt engineering in the context of what the article is talking about: It is 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding some selected fraction of that power locally through a conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).
My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-performative systems into a death spiral of pure uselessness.
In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts. Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it forces developers to engage in less "performative copy-paste of stackoverflow/code-docs/examples/etc." and engage the mind in what those lines should be. Even if, this engagement of the mind, is a prompt.
First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us.
Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal development" when interacting with an LLM.
(There's even something to be said about prompt engineering in the context of what the article is talking about: It is 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding some selected fraction of that power locally through a conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).