And yet my Google engineer friend tells me to use Bard for my math coursework. I know it’s just an anecdote but what’s with the hype?

I was paying attention and it’s why I refuse to use LLMs for math, but I’m being told by people inside the castle to do so. So it is not so black and white in the messaging dept.

I have a tenured architect proposing that we stop sending structured data internally between two services (JSON) - and instead pass raw textual data spat out by an LLM which linguistically encodes the same information.

Literally nothing about this proposal makes sense. The loss of precision/accuracy (the LLM is akin to applying one-way lossy and non-deterministic encoding to the source data), the costs involved, efficiency, etc.

All just to tell everybody they managed to shove LLMs somewhere into the backend.

That last sentence is pretty dismissive and unnecessary, maybe even outright mean. It's possible that the person you're replying to is simply not as deeply ingrained in the technical literature as you are, or has more demands on their time than you do.

It didn’t seem particularly mean to me.