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"Skeptics" is also a loaded term; what does it actually mean? I find LLMs incredibly useful for various programming tasks (generating code, searching documentat

by mjr00 10mo ago

"Skeptics" is also a loaded term; what does it actually mean? I find LLMs incredibly useful for various programming tasks (generating code, searching documentation, and yes with enough setup agents can accomplish some tasks), but I also don't believe they have actual intelligence, nor do I think they will eviscerate programming jobs, the same way that Python and JavaScript didn't eviscerate programming jobs despite lowering the barrier to entry compared to Java or C. Does that make me a skeptic? It's easy to declare "victory" when you're only talking about the maximalist position on one side ("LLMs are totally useless!") vs the minimalist position on the other side ("LLMs can generate useful code"). The AI maximalist position of "AI is going to become superintelligent and make all human work and intelligence obsolete" has certainly not been proven.

Aurornis 10mo ago
No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. The LLM skeptics claim LLM usefulness is an illusion. That the LLMs are a fad, and they produced more problems than they solve. They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their first bad output instead of trying to work with the LLM to iterate like everyone who gets value out of them. The skeptics are the people in every AI thread claiming LLMs are a fad that will go away when the VC money runs out, that the only reason anyone uses LLMs is because their boss forces them to, or who blame every bug or security announcement on vibecoding.
- mjr00 10mo ago
  > No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you! I agree though, there's a certain class of "AI denialism" which pretends that LLMs don't do anything useful, which in almost-2026 is pretty hard to argue.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    > That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you! The context was the article quoted, not HN comments. I’ve been called all sorts of things on HN and been accused of everything from being a bot to a corporate shill here. You can find people applying labels and throwing around accusations in every thread here. It doesn’t mean much after a while.
  - emp17344 10mo ago
    On the other hand, ever since LLMs came on the scene, there’s been a vocal group claiming that AI will become intelligent and rapidly bring about human extinction - think the r/singularity crowd. This seems just as untenable a position to hold at this point. It’s becoming clear that these things are simply tools. Useful in many cases, but that’s it.
    - Aurornis 10mo ago
      The AI doomers have actually been around long before LLMs. Discussion about AI doom has been popular in the rationalist communities for a very long time. Look up “Roko’s Basilisk” for a history of one of these concepts from 15 years ago that has been pervasive since then. It has been entertaining to see how Yudkowsky and the rationalist community spent over a decade building around these AI doom arguments, then they squandered their moment in the spotlight by making crazy demands about halting all AI development and bombing data centers.
    - squidbeak 10mo ago
      > This seems just as untenable a position to hold at this point To say that any prediction about the future shape of a technology is 'untenable' is pretty silly. Unless you've popped back in a time machine to post this.
    - heliumtera 10mo ago
      Lots of money to be made and power to be grabed on this safety and alignment moat.
- somewhereoutth 10mo ago
  Not just their usefulness, but LLMs themselves are worse than an illusion, they are illusions that people often believe in unquestioningly - perhaps are being forced to believe in unquestionably (because of mandates, or short term time pressures as kind of race to the bottom). When the ROI in training the next model is realised to be zero or even negative, then yes the money will run out. Existing models will soldier on for a while as (bankrupt) operators attempt to squeeze out the last few cents/pennies, but they will become more and more out of date, and so the 'age of LLMs' will draw to a close. I confess my skeptic-addled brain initially (in hope?) misread the title of the post as 'Reflections on the end of LLMs in 2025'. Maybe we'll get that for 2026!
- candiddevmike 10mo ago
  Skeptic here: I do think LLMs are a fad for software development. They're an interesting phenomen that people have convinced themselves MUST BE USEFUL in the context of software development, either through ignorance or a sense of desperation. I do not believe LLMs will be used long term for any kind of serious software development use cases, as the maintenance cost of the code they produce will run development teams into bankruptcy. I also believe the current generations of LLMs (transformers) are technical dead ends on the path to real AGI, and the more time we spend hyping them, the less research/money gets spent on discovering new/better paths beyond transformers. I wish we could go back to complaining about Kubernetes, focusing on scaling distributed systems, and solving more interesting problems that comparing winnings on a stochastic slot machine. I wish our industry was held to higher standards than jockeying bug-ridden MVP code as quickly as possible.
  - AYBABTME 10mo ago
    In this year of 2025, in December, I find it untenable for anyone to hold this position unless they have not yet given LLMs a good enough try. They're undeniably useful in software development, particularly on tasks that are amenable to structured software development methodologies. I've fixed countless bugs in a tiny fraction of the time, entirely accelerated by the use of LLM agents. I get the most reliable results simply making LLMs follow the "red test, green test" approach, where the LLM first creates a reproducer from a natural language explanation of the problem, and then cooks up a fix. This works extremely well and reliably in producing high quality results.
    - gldrk 10mo ago
      'It's $CURRENTYEAR' is just a cheap FOMO tactic. We've been hearing these anectodes for multiple current years now. Where is this less buggy software? Does it just happen to never reach users?
      - otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
        Just two more LLM models and two more prompt optimizations.
- lowsong 10mo ago
  > They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their first bad output instead of trying to work with the LLM to iterate like everyone who gets value out of them. "Ah-hah you stopped when this tool blew your whole leg off. If you'd stuck with it like the rest of us you could learn to only take off a few toes every now and again, but I'm confident that in time it will hardly ever do that."
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    > "Ah-hah you stopped when this tool blew your whole leg off. Yes, because everyone who uses LLMs simply writes a prompt and then lets it write all of the code for them without thinkng! Vibecoding amirite!?
    - ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
      To be fair, that does seem be a very common usage pattern for them, to the point where they're even becoming a nuisance to open source projects; e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330378
- heavyset_go 10mo ago
  You can acknowledge both the fad phenomenon and the usefulness of LLMs at the same time, because both are true. There's value there, but there's also a lot of hype that will pass, just like the AGI nonsense that companies were promising their current/next model will reach.
- SecretDreams 10mo ago
  I think LLM skeptics come in a variety of styles. I am skeptical of the current amount of capital flowing into AI vs expected returns on that capital. I use AI regularly. Often for free. I'm not clear what the path to profitability looks like a d justification of valuations. That's why it has dotcom vibes, not because I don't believe in the technology. I don't believe in the snakes pedalling the valuations.
threethirtytwo 10mo ago
You're not a skeptic but you're not fully a supporter either. You live in this grey zone of contradictions. First you find them useful but not intelligent. That is a bit of a contradiction. Basically anyone who has used AI, seriously knows that while it can be used to regurgitate generic filler and bootstrap code it can also be used to solve complex domain specific problems that is not at all part of its training data. This by definition makes it intelligent and it makes it so we know the LLM understands the problem it was given. it would be This by definition makes it intelligent, and it makes it so we know the LLM understands the problem it was given. It would be disingenuous for me not to mention how wrong and how much an LLM hallucinates, so obviously the thing has flaws and is not super intelligence. But you have to judge the entire spectrum of what it does. It gets things right and it gets things wrong and getting something complex right makes it intelligent while getting something wrong does not predude it from intelligence. Second most non skeptics aren't saying all human work is going to be obsolete. no one can predict the future. But you've got to be blind if you don't see the trendline of progress. Literally look at the progress of AI for the past 15 years. You have to be next level delusional if you can't project another 15 years and see that obviously a super intelligence or at least an intelligence comparable to humans is not a reasonable prediction. Most skeptics like you ignore the trendline and cling to what Yann lecunn said about llms being stochastic parrots. It is very likely something with human intelligence exists in the future and in our lifetimes, whether or not its an LLM remains to be seen but we can't ignore where the trendlines are pointing.

by mjr00 10mo ago

Aurornis 10mo ago

No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. The LLM skeptics claim LLM usefulness is an illusion. That the LLMs are a fad, and they produced more problems than they solve. They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their first bad output instead of trying to work with the LLM to iterate like everyone who gets value out of them. The skeptics are the people in every AI thread claiming LLMs are a fad that will go away when the VC money runs out, that the only reason anyone uses LLMs is because their boss forces them to, or who blame every bug or security announcement on vibecoding.

mjr00 10mo ago
> No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you! I agree though, there's a certain class of "AI denialism" which pretends that LLMs don't do anything useful, which in almost-2026 is pretty hard to argue.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > That's good to hear, but I have been called an AI skeptic a lot on hn, so not everyone agrees with you! The context was the article quoted, not HN comments. I’ve been called all sorts of things on HN and been accused of everything from being a bot to a corporate shill here. You can find people applying labels and throwing around accusations in every thread here. It doesn’t mean much after a while.
- emp17344 10mo ago
  On the other hand, ever since LLMs came on the scene, there’s been a vocal group claiming that AI will become intelligent and rapidly bring about human extinction - think the r/singularity crowd. This seems just as untenable a position to hold at this point. It’s becoming clear that these things are simply tools. Useful in many cases, but that’s it.
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    The AI doomers have actually been around long before LLMs. Discussion about AI doom has been popular in the rationalist communities for a very long time. Look up “Roko’s Basilisk” for a history of one of these concepts from 15 years ago that has been pervasive since then. It has been entertaining to see how Yudkowsky and the rationalist community spent over a decade building around these AI doom arguments, then they squandered their moment in the spotlight by making crazy demands about halting all AI development and bombing data centers.
  - squidbeak 10mo ago
    > This seems just as untenable a position to hold at this point To say that any prediction about the future shape of a technology is 'untenable' is pretty silly. Unless you've popped back in a time machine to post this.
  - heliumtera 10mo ago
    Lots of money to be made and power to be grabed on this safety and alignment moat.
somewhereoutth 10mo ago
Not just their usefulness, but LLMs themselves are worse than an illusion, they are illusions that people often believe in unquestioningly - perhaps are being forced to believe in unquestionably (because of mandates, or short term time pressures as kind of race to the bottom). When the ROI in training the next model is realised to be zero or even negative, then yes the money will run out. Existing models will soldier on for a while as (bankrupt) operators attempt to squeeze out the last few cents/pennies, but they will become more and more out of date, and so the 'age of LLMs' will draw to a close. I confess my skeptic-addled brain initially (in hope?) misread the title of the post as 'Reflections on the end of LLMs in 2025'. Maybe we'll get that for 2026!
candiddevmike 10mo ago
Skeptic here: I do think LLMs are a fad for software development. They're an interesting phenomen that people have convinced themselves MUST BE USEFUL in the context of software development, either through ignorance or a sense of desperation. I do not believe LLMs will be used long term for any kind of serious software development use cases, as the maintenance cost of the code they produce will run development teams into bankruptcy. I also believe the current generations of LLMs (transformers) are technical dead ends on the path to real AGI, and the more time we spend hyping them, the less research/money gets spent on discovering new/better paths beyond transformers. I wish we could go back to complaining about Kubernetes, focusing on scaling distributed systems, and solving more interesting problems that comparing winnings on a stochastic slot machine. I wish our industry was held to higher standards than jockeying bug-ridden MVP code as quickly as possible.
- AYBABTME 10mo ago
  In this year of 2025, in December, I find it untenable for anyone to hold this position unless they have not yet given LLMs a good enough try. They're undeniably useful in software development, particularly on tasks that are amenable to structured software development methodologies. I've fixed countless bugs in a tiny fraction of the time, entirely accelerated by the use of LLM agents. I get the most reliable results simply making LLMs follow the "red test, green test" approach, where the LLM first creates a reproducer from a natural language explanation of the problem, and then cooks up a fix. This works extremely well and reliably in producing high quality results.
  - gldrk 10mo ago
    'It's $CURRENTYEAR' is just a cheap FOMO tactic. We've been hearing these anectodes for multiple current years now. Where is this less buggy software? Does it just happen to never reach users?
    - otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
      Just two more LLM models and two more prompt optimizations.
lowsong 10mo ago
> They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their first bad output instead of trying to work with the LLM to iterate like everyone who gets value out of them. "Ah-hah you stopped when this tool blew your whole leg off. If you'd stuck with it like the rest of us you could learn to only take off a few toes every now and again, but I'm confident that in time it will hardly ever do that."
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > "Ah-hah you stopped when this tool blew your whole leg off. Yes, because everyone who uses LLMs simply writes a prompt and then lets it write all of the code for them without thinkng! Vibecoding amirite!?
  - ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
    To be fair, that does seem be a very common usage pattern for them, to the point where they're even becoming a nuisance to open source projects; e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330378
heavyset_go 10mo ago
You can acknowledge both the fad phenomenon and the usefulness of LLMs at the same time, because both are true. There's value there, but there's also a lot of hype that will pass, just like the AGI nonsense that companies were promising their current/next model will reach.
SecretDreams 10mo ago
I think LLM skeptics come in a variety of styles. I am skeptical of the current amount of capital flowing into AI vs expected returns on that capital. I use AI regularly. Often for free. I'm not clear what the path to profitability looks like a d justification of valuations. That's why it has dotcom vibes, not because I don't believe in the technology. I don't believe in the snakes pedalling the valuations.

threethirtytwo 10mo ago

You're not a skeptic but you're not fully a supporter either. You live in this grey zone of contradictions. First you find them useful but not intelligent. That is a bit of a contradiction. Basically anyone who has used AI, seriously knows that while it can be used to regurgitate generic filler and bootstrap code it can also be used to solve complex domain specific problems that is not at all part of its training data. This by definition makes it intelligent and it makes it so we know the LLM understands the problem it was given. it would be This by definition makes it intelligent, and it makes it so we know the LLM understands the problem it was given. It would be disingenuous for me not to mention how wrong and how much an LLM hallucinates, so obviously the thing has flaws and is not super intelligence. But you have to judge the entire spectrum of what it does. It gets things right and it gets things wrong and getting something complex right makes it intelligent while getting something wrong does not predude it from intelligence. Second most non skeptics aren't saying all human work is going to be obsolete. no one can predict the future. But you've got to be blind if you don't see the trendline of progress. Literally look at the progress of AI for the past 15 years. You have to be next level delusional if you can't project another 15 years and see that obviously a super intelligence or at least an intelligence comparable to humans is not a reasonable prediction. Most skeptics like you ignore the trendline and cling to what Yann lecunn said about llms being stochastic parrots. It is very likely something with human intelligence exists in the future and in our lifetimes, whether or not its an LLM remains to be seen but we can't ignore where the trendlines are pointing.