5 years ago I was working on LLMs because I believed in them. And yet I didn't think we'd get where we are today without a major paradigm shift. I definitely didn't expect things to move so fast. I was wrong. It's astonishing to see some of the very vocal people who were far more skeptical than I was insist that they were right all along, because "hey, today's models do a lot more than predict the next token." Like, sure, coding agents can run commands in a terminal. But they do it by predicting the next token. What in the world did you expect? No one was claiming that LLMs would solve every problem without any way to interact with their environment. But the layer on top is very thin, and tool use isn't a new paradigm. "Giving BERT a Calculator" came out 7 years ago. Science is about updating your beliefs based on evidence. Admitting that your view has changed doesn't make you a worse scientist. It makes you a better one. This obsession with "I've been saying the same thing for X years and I was right all along" is so tiresome, and sets a terrible example for the general public and the new generation of scientists.