[qnleigh]

Here's a potential analogy: AlphaGo made a major breakthrough when it beat Lee Sedol. For many of us, that was the end of it, but for for professional Go players, it revolutionized the game it ways that no one outside of the Go community can really appreciate. Likewise for AlphaFold and protein structure determination, where it has revolutionized a field of research and at this point you only see this directly if you're using the tool day-to-day (in which case it may have dramatically changed the nature of your research).

For many software products I think you have a point, where superficial things like word processors are mostly just getting bloated these days. But for open-ended things like Mathematics, having new tools can crack open deep problems that were unapproachable in the old way. This new way of doing research may not turn out to be for everyone, but at the end of the day the field will explore previously unapproachable but undeniably interesting territory.

It might also make mathematics more accessible, and a possible outcome of that might be that more superficial mathematics gets done. But if it also enabled more deep mathematics then there's no point being cynical about the former. Maybe there is a similar fallacy with respect to software development.