> things I've used that seem to be better than they were
A bunch of things got obsolete with emergence of good LLMs, especially in research and working with text tasks. See usage graphs of Stackoverflow, Grammarly and others.
"Obsolete" is an incomplete characterization of the state of play.
LLMs put the information from StackOverflow into an arguably more helpful format, but they're still heavily dependent on human input. The LLM must periodically harvest info from human communities to stay up-to-date with technological progress. If those communities die, the LLM will not compensate, and other communities will arise to replace them. Those communities may have different attitudes towards the LLMs that killed their ancestors.
When the same name is used a thousand times in a codebase, shorter names start to make sense. See aviation manuals or business documentation, how abbreviation-dense they are.
When I ponder about PL semantics, crossroad feature is currying. This decides whether partial application, pattern matching, function composition, combinators, and other functional features would play a major role in the language design. Functions are curried? ML style. Not curried? C style.
I think models don't treat is as riddle, rather a practical question. With latter, it makes sense that car is already at the car wash, otherwise the question makes no sense.
EDIT: framed the question as a riddle and all models except for Llama 4 Scout failed anyway.
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