One way to assess how transformational a technology might be is by looking at the habits it displaces. It inherits the value of the old habit and adds on top of it. A habit that's a gateway to other behaviors is worth way more than a frequent one that leads nowhere. Search wasn't just "looking things up," it was the front door to all knowledge work. The phone wasn't just calling, it was the front door to all coordination. The camera in your pocket didn't just displace the Kodak, it displaced memory itself. Nobody memorizes a parking spot or a wifi code anymore.

Take how we used to meet friends. You'd agree on a place and a time, the shop, the terrain, the corner, and everyone showed up on faith. If someone didn't come, you just didn't know why until next time. You memorized phone numbers. You went to someone's house unannounced and maybe they weren't there, and that was a normal afternoon. Then phones displaced all of that: the fixed meeting point, the memorized numbers, the wasted trips. Then social media went further. You now knew at all times what everyone was up to without asking. But the biggest thing social media did was create habits that had no predecessor. Nobody was scrolling through acquaintances' lives before. Nobody was performing their vacation for an audience. Nobody checked what strangers thought of them every twenty minutes. The largest habit is always the one that doesn't exist yet.

LLMs are doing the same now. The displaced habits are easy to list: search, Stack Overflow, the first draft, the quick question to a colleague, the junior task you used to delegate. The no-predecessor habits are already forming. Thinking out loud with a machine that pushes back. Asking a question you'd be embarrassed to ask a human. Getting a second opinion on a message before sending it. Starting work from a conversation instead of a blank page. In five years some of these will look like infinite scroll looks now: obvious, massive, and invisible in every prediction made before it existed.

So the urgent question for me at least isn't how transformational LLMs will be. It's what reality looks like once the rerouting is done, and which habits will exist that don't today. From there you work backward to be ready. Better roughly right about the shape than exactly right about the direction.