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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• budududuroiu 10mo ago
  I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.
  • ymyms 10mo ago
    I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, but that's not necessarily a given if pre-LLM companies are any indication.
    • j2kun 10mo ago
      Sounds like you should go bundle sub-prime mortgages into some complex securities, if you like intentionally living on the knife's edge of disaster.
      • ymyms 10mo ago
        Huh? Where did I say that's what I like? I'm just trying to discuss for discussion's sake. Personally, I want a world that rewards the people who put their thought, care, and craftsmanship into something more than those that don't. In order to live in that world, I think we need to discuss the parts (maybe the whole) that don't and why that might be.
        • hu3 10mo ago
          don't bother. Your parent commenter is writing some loaded comments in this post.
    • falloutx 10mo ago
      This is not reality for most companies. Some have billions in bank but still produce slop. Its because their internal systems rewards slop.
  • theshrike79 10mo ago
    Most of us are paid to solve problems and deliver features, not craft the most perfect code known to man. If the slop-o-matic next to you is delivering 5 features a week without tripping up QA and you do one every two weeks - which one will the company pick when layoffs hit again?
    • tstrimple 10mo ago
      Most developer jobs are like working at Ikea, but most developers on HN pretend they are fine furniture craftsman and that's really what everyone needs or the whole world will fall apart. It turns out, the vast majority of the population is quite happy with a LACK side table and their carefully crafted dovetail joinery adds nothing but expense to the average use case.
      • theshrike79 10mo ago
        Exactly. With the current over-funded startup market people can spend tons of time and money building over-engineered juicers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ - and their software equivalent. So many companies would be just fine with a single VPS, Python and PostgreSQL - but that's boring and doesn't look good in your resume =)
• rudedogg 10mo ago
  Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a good prompt that activates the right weights, getting you higher quality output. But if you’re seeing output that is consistently better than what you produce by hand, you’re probably just below average at programming. And yes, it matters sometimes. Look at the number of software bugs we’re all subjected to. And let’s not forget that code is a liability. Utilizing code that was “cheap” to generate has a cost, which I’m sure will be the subject of much conversation in the near future.
  • ch4s3 10mo ago
    In my view they’re great for rough drafts, iterating on ideas, throwaway code, and pushing into areas I haven’t become proficient in yet. I think in a lot of cases they write ok enough tests.
  • christophilus 10mo ago
    Claude Code is way better than I am at rummaging through Git history, handling merge conflicts, renaming things, writing SQL queries whose syntax I always forget (window functions and the like). But yeah. If I give it a big, non-specific task, it generates a lot of mediocre (or worse) code.
    • throwawayffffas 10mo ago
      That's funny that's all the things I don't trust it to do. I actually use it the other way around, give it a big non-specific task, see if it works, specify better, retry, throw away 60% - 90% of the generated code, fix bugs in a bunch of places and out comes an implemented feature.
      • bryanlarsen 10mo ago
        Agreed. Claude is horrible at munging git history and can destroy the thing I depend on to fix Claude's messes. I always do my git rebasing by hand. The first iteration of Claude code is usually a big over-coded mess, but it's pretty good at iterating to clean it up, given proper instruction.
• IncreasePosts 10mo ago
  mitchellh talked about how he vibe coded the one off visualization code for some blog post of his recently, and he seems like a fairly good programmer
  • jacquesm 10mo ago
    For good craftspeople bad tools are still tools. For bad craftspeople tools, good ones and bad ones, are just a way to produce more crap.
• kiernanmcgowan 10mo ago
  LLMs are really great at copy/pasting answers from stack overflow and fitting them to work in a given system. If your work is outside what is answerable on stack overflow you're going to end up fighting the results constantly. Front end pages like a user settings page? Done. One shottable. Nuanced data migration problems specific to your stack? You're going to be yelling at the agent. > LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were. A bit harsh considering that many of us used knowledge bases like SO for so long to figure out new problems that we were confronting.
  • meowface 10mo ago
    From my heavy experience using every frontier model for a year now, LLMs are actually probably much, much better at nuanced data migration problems specific to your stack than at a frontend user settings page. (Though still pretty good at both. And the user settings page will work, sure.)
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    > Front end pages like a user settings page? Done. One shottable. This is only one shottable if you are high paced startup or you don't care enough. In real world software, you would need to make it accessible, store data in a complaint way, hook up translations, make sure all inputs are validated and do some usability testing.
• accrual 10mo ago
  I see it only as a threat to those who have a deep hook into their role as a SWE. If as a SWE you see the oncoming change and adapt to it, no issue. If as a SWE you see the enablement of LLMs as an existential threat, then you will find many issues, and you will fail to adapt and have all kind of issues related to it.
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    If a company wants to cut a lot of SWE it wouldn't matter if you have adapted or not, they will just cut as much as they can. How can you adapt more than another SWE? These tools seem easy to learn and there isn't a massive learning curve if you're a programmer. I wonder if changing to a different role would work but I would be skeptical, because after SWEs they will try to cut the other jobs and if there is no one at the bottom, middle management doesn't make sense.
  • mahaekoh 10mo ago
    Read the article. The author wants LLMs to work for them, but they don’t. You’re confusing results and intention.
• Terr_ 10mo ago
  > And then, inevitably, comes the character evaluation, which goes something like this: I saw a version of this yesterday where a commenter framed LLM-skepticism as a disappointing lack of "hacker" drive and ethos that should be applied to making "AI" toolchains work. As you might guess, I disagreed: The "hacker" is not driven just by novelty in problems to solve, but in wanting to understand them on more than a surface layer. Messing with kludgy things until they somehow work is always a part of software engineering... but the motive and payoff comes from knowing how things work, and perceiving how they could work better. What I "fear" from LLMs-in-coding is that they will provide an unlimited flow of "mess around until it works" drudgery tasks with none of the upside. The human role will be hammering at problems which don't really have a "root cause" (except in a stochastic sense) and for which there is never any permanent or clever fix. Would we say someone is "not really an artist" just because they don't want to spend their days reviewing generated photos for extra-fingers, circling them, and hitting the "redo" button?
  • Cornbilly 10mo ago
    I share your fear. We have a hard enough time finding juniors (hell, non-juniors) that know how to program and design effectively. The industry jerking itself off over Leetcode practice already stunted the growth of many by having them focus on rote memorization and gaming interviews. With ubiquitous AI and all of these “very smart people” pushing LLMs as an alternative to coding, I fear we’re heading into an era where people don’t understand how anything works and have never been pushed to find out. Then again, the ability of LLMs to write boilerplate may be the reset that we need to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS that have flocked to the industry over the last decade or so looking for an easy big paycheck.
    • Terr_ 10mo ago
      > to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS I had assumed most of them had either filtered out at some stage (an early one being college intro CS classes), ended up employed somewhere that didn't seem to mind their output, or perpetually circle on LinkedIn as "Lemons" for their next prey/employer. My gut feeling is that messy code-gen will increase their numbers rather than decrease them. LLMs make it easier to generate an illusion of constant progress, and the humans can attribute the good parts of the output to themselves, while blaming bad-parts on the LLM.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• reb 10mo ago
  How much longer until we get to just... let the results speak for themselves and stop relitigating an open question with no clear answer. We're well past ad nauseum now. Let's talk about anything else.
  • WolfeReader 10mo ago
    Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.
    • selfhoster11 10mo ago
      Far less than you'd think for local LLMs.
      • SchemaLoad 10mo ago
        Local LLMs that you can run on consumer hardware don't really do anything though. They are amusing, maybe you could use them for basic text search, but they don't have any real knowledge like the hosted ones do.
        • selfhoster11 10mo ago
          Gemma 3 27B, some smaller models in the 8-16B size range, and up to 32B can be run on hardware that fits in the "consumer" bracket. RAM is more expensive now, but most people can afford a machine with 32GB and maybe a small graphics card. Small models don't have as much world knowledge as very large models (proprietary or open source ones), but it's not always needed. They still can do a lot of stuff. OCR and image captioning, tagging, following well-defined instructions, general chat, some coding, are all things local models do pretty well. Edit: fixed unnecessarily abrasive wording
    • lijok 10mo ago
      How many lives would AI have to save for you to say the energy cost is worth it?
• groby_b 10mo ago
  Can we just agree that both the pro- and anti-llm faction mostly contribute noise? And go back to discuss actual achievements? It's trivial to share coding sessions, be they horrific or great. Without those, you're hot air on the internet, independent of whatever specific opinions on LLMs you voice.
• jhack 10mo ago
  "And it made me think - why are these people so insistent, and hostile? Why can't they live and let live? Why do they need to convince the rest of us?" Same could be said about the anti-AI crowd. I'm glad the author made the distinction that he's talking about LLMs, though, because far too many people these days like to shout from the rooftops about all AI being bad, totally ignoring (willfully or otherwise) important areas it's being used in like cancer research.
• ymyms 10mo ago
  "I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful1 in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines." I am curious why the author doesn't think this saves them time (i.e. makes them more productive). I never had terribly high output as a programmer. I certainly think LLMs have helped increased the amount of code that I can write, net total, in a year. Not to superhuman levels or even super-me levels, just me++. But, I think the total time spent producing code has gone down to a fraction and has allowed me more time to spend thinking about what my code is meant to solve. I wonder about two things: 1. maybe added productivity isn't going to be found in total code produced, because there is a limit on how much useful code can be produced that is based on external factors 2. do some devs look at the output of an LLM and "get the ick" because they didn't write it and LLM-code is often more verbose and "ugly", even though it may work? (this is a total supposition and not an accusation in any way. i also understand that poorly thought out, overly verbose code comes with problems over time)
  • developerDan 10mo ago
    It seems you find LoC as a measure of productivity. This would answer your question as to why the author does not find it makes them more productive. If total output increases, but quality decreases (which in terms of code means more bugs) then has productivity increased or has it stayed the same? To answer my own question, if you can pump out features faster but turn around and spend more time on bugs than you do previously then your productivity is likely net neutral. There is a reason LoC as a measure of productivity has been shunned from the industry for many, many years.
    • ymyms 10mo ago
      I didn't mean to imply LoC as a measurement of productivity. What I really mean is more "amount of useful code produced to a level the human-using-the-llm determines to be useful". To try and give an example, say that you want to make a module that transforms some data and you ask the LLM to do it. It generates a module with tons of single-layer if-else branches with a huge LoC. Maybe one human dev looks at it and says, "great this solves my problem and the LoC and verbosity isn't an issue even though it is ugly". Maybe the second looks at it and says, "there's definitely some abstraction I can find to make this easier to understand and build on top of." Depending on the scenario and context, either of them could be correct.
• jraph 10mo ago
  This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon and Antirez are part of the hostile LLM evangelists the article criticizes. Although the article does generalize to all LLM evangelists at least in some parts and Simon did react to this here. For these reasons, I haven't ruled him out as a target of this article, at least partly.
  • j2kun 10mo ago
    The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live (maybe Antirez a bit less, but they're still not mean about it).
    • ymyms 10mo ago
      My gut says that is not a property of LLM evangelists, but a property of current internet culture in general. People with strong, divisive, and engaging opinions seem to do well (by some definition of well) online.
      • vunderba 10mo ago
        This. For every absurd LLM cheerleader, there’s a corresponding LLM minimalist who trots out the “stochastic parrot” line at every possible occasion along with the fact that they do CrossFit and don’t own a TV.
      • SchemaLoad 10mo ago
        It's weird how some people seem to treat using an LLM as part of their personality in a borderline cult like way. So someone saying they don't use it or don't find it useful triggers an anger response in them.
• simonw 10mo ago
  "LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?" No.
  • wild_egg 10mo ago
    I do wonder if C programmers ever asked that of Python devs back in the day.
    • chadcmulligan 10mo ago
      Still do
    • morshu9001 10mo ago
      This is still a thing today. There have been multiple times I oneshot some project that leadership had been waiting on some team forever to finish, and 90% of it was them refusing to touch a "noob" lang like Python or JS.
    • habinero 10mo ago
      Any good engineer can become a good engineer in any language.
      • christophilus 10mo ago
        Except brainfuck and Haskell.
    • zahlman 10mo ago
      Back in the day, Python devs commonly were C programmers. Someone had to do the implementation, after all. And the C API was (and still is) kind of a big deal. There's a reason the standard library is full of direct ports of C libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic names and APIs. (Of course, it's also full of direct ports of Java libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic architecture.)
  • frizlab 10mo ago
    No, LLM evangelists will not be willing to admit this in general, or no, you, as an LLM evangelist, are not not willing to admit this?
• minimaltom 10mo ago
  I like OP's representation, but I feel like a lot of people arent saying 'LLMs are the bomb dot com _right now_' (though some are), but rather the trend is evident: these things will keep getting better, and the writing is on the wall. Personally I think the rate of improvement will plateau: in my experience software inevitably becomes less about tech and more about the interpersonal human soup of negotiating requirements, needs, contradiction, and feedback loops, at lot of which is not signal accessible to a text-in-text-out engine.
  • Slartie 10mo ago
    It "becomes"? In a lot of areas, particularly enterprise, business stuff, it had been mostly about all of these things for decades.
    • minimaltom 10mo ago
      "becomes" as in the locus of focus as my career progresses. Vibes-wise, i think we agree / are saying the same thing.
• duendefm 10mo ago
  Until some days / weeks ago, LLM's for coding was more hype than actually real code producing. That is gone now. They clearly leveled up, things will not be the same anymore. And of course this is not just for coding, this is just the beginning. A month ago it really seemed that the models were hitting a complexity wall and that the architecture would need to be improved. Not anymore.
  • Turskarama 10mo ago
    I have seen people say something along these lines what feels like every month for the past year.
    • duendefm 10mo ago
      It's different this time. You can see that at the same time, they are finally, definitely solving hard mathematical problems. They passed the phase of just being like good search engines to being actual generators of new data from their generalizations. I can give you a simple example. Any code they generated before brought frustration and they would loop with feedback. Now they actually produce "human level" code.
      • blibble 10mo ago
        > It's different this time. they said this every time too
    • lijok 10mo ago
      And they’re right every single time. It’s only getting crazier and crazier. Look around. Pay attention.
      • cindyllm 10mo ago
        [dead]
• perardi 10mo ago
  5 anti-AI posts on the home page of Hacker News…yeah, plenty of insecure evangelism amongst the skeptics, too.
  • lekevicius 10mo ago
    Is there enough of new blood on HN? For me it was the best place, my favorite website, when I was entering startup scene. Loved it. I don't think a lot of young founders I know ever go here...
    • roadside_picnic 10mo ago
      > young founders While this place has always been attractive to people building startups, back in the day (my original account is from 2009) "Hacker" News was much more about Hackers. Most people posting here had read "On Lisp", respected Paul Graham as a programmer and were enthusiastic about programming and solving problems above all else. I'm honestly curious how many people that visit HN today even know what a "y combinator" is, and I have a pretty reasonable guess as to how many have implemented it for fun (though probably the applicative order version).
    • SchemaLoad 10mo ago
      They are on LinkedIn now posting hustle bro posts about how they wake up at 4 am for yoga while Claude Code generates everything for them.
• habinero 10mo ago
  I'm dubbing this "podcast driven development" because so many of them aren't building things to build things, they just want to _have built something_ so they can go on podcasts and talk about how great it is. For what it's worth, I think most of them are genuine when they say they're seeing 10X gains,they just went from, like, a 0.01X engineer (centi-swe) to to a 0.1X engineer (deci-swe).
• meowface 10mo ago
  I feel no strong need to convince others. I've been seeing major productivity boosts for myself and others since Sonnet 3.5. Maybe for certain kinds of projects and use cases it's less good, maybe they're not using it well; I dunno. I do think a lot of these people probably will be left behind if they don't adopt it within the next 3 years, but that's not really my problem.
  • moron4hire 10mo ago
    What's there to be left behind on? That's like arguing people who stick to driving cars with manual transmissions are going to get left behind when buses "inevitably get good." The whole point of the AI coding thing is that it lets inexperienced people create software. What skill moat are you building that a skilled software developer won't be able to pick up in 20 minutes?
    • theshrike79 10mo ago
      Your analogy is the wrong way around :) Everyone now is driving automatic, LLMs are the manual transmission in a classic car with "character". Yes, anyone can step into one, start it and maybe get there, but the transmission and engine will make strange noises all the way and most people just stick to the first gear because the second gear needs this weird wiggle and a trick with the gas pedal to engage properly. Using (agentic) LLMs as coding assistants is a skill that (at the moment) can't really be taught as it's not deterministic and based a lot on feels and getting the hang of different base models (gemini, sonnet/opus, gpt, GLM etc). The only way to really learn is by doing. Yes, anyone can start up Google Antigravity or whatever and say "build me a todo app" and you'll get one. That's just the first gear.
    • JamesSwift 10mo ago
      (Dont take this as an attack on you personally, just on the sentiment you are giving in your comment) The attitude you present here has become my litmus test for who has actually given the agents a thorough shake rather than just a cursory glance. These agents are tools, not magic (even though they appear to be magic when they are really humming). They require operator skill to corral them. They need tweaking and iteration, often from people already skilled in the kinds of software they are trying to write. Its only then that you get the true potential, and its only then you realize just how much more productive you can be _because of them_, not _in spite of them_. The tools are imperfect, and there are a lot of rough edges that a skilled operator can sand down to become huge boons for themselves rather than getting cut and saying "the tools suck". Its very much like google. Anyone can google anything. But at a certain point, you need to understand _how to google_ to get good results rather than just slapping any random phrase and hoping the top 3 results are magically going to answer you. And sometimes you need to combine the information from multiple results to get what you are going for.
• bashtoni 10mo ago
  The tech industry seems to attract people that feel personally attacked when someone else makes different choices that they do. "Why are you using Go? Rust is best! You should be using that!" "Don't use AWS CDK, use Terraform! Don't you know anything?"
  • sharkjacobs 10mo ago
    It's not just the tech industry, this is a fundamental feature of humans as social animals. https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/433740-just-coffee-black https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/433740-just-coffee-black > want to feel normal, to walk around and see that most other people made the same choice they made
  • zephen 10mo ago
    Humans are tribal, which has both benefits and costs. In technology, the historical benefits of evangelizing your favorite technology might just be that it becomes more popular and better supported. Even though LLMs may or may not follow the same path, if you can get your fellow man on-board, then you'll have a shared frame of reference, and someone to talk through different usage scenarios.
  • vitaflo 10mo ago
    You need to be fairly smart to be in tech. People who grew up smart and were told they were tend to view it as part of their self worth. If someone disagrees with this person later on, their self with has been attacked so of course they are going to lash out. The worst thing you can say to a dev is they are wrong. Most will do everything in their power to prove otherwise, even on the dumbest of topics.
  • mrguyorama 10mo ago
    Keep in mind that anyone posting on a forum (just like this), or so much more, anyone blogging about something is already a huge selection bias for people who believe that their opinion needs to be shared. You don't hear from all the people who don't feel that others must know their opinion. Lurkers always outweigh posters. Don't ever make the mistake of believing that a sample of posts is a sample of people
• lijok 10mo ago
  > You see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive without it. Demonstrably impossible if you’re actually properly trying to use them in non-esoteric domains. I challenge anyone to very honestly showcase a non-esoteric domain in which opus4.5 does not make even the most experienced developer more productive.
  • j2kun 10mo ago
    How would one set this sort of test up? I surely have example domains where LLMs routinely do poorly (for example, custom bazel rules and workspaces), but what would constitute a "showcase" here?
    • lijok 10mo ago
      To change my mind I’ll be satisfied with a thorough description of the domain and ideally a theory on why it does poorly in that domain. But we’re not talking LLMs here, we’re talking opus4.5 specifically.
      • j2kun 10mo ago
        A theory besides... not enough training data? Is it even possible to formulate a coherent theory about this? I'm talking about customizing a widely-used build system, not exactly state-of-the-art cryptography. What could I possibly say that you wouldn't counter with "skill issue" (which goes back to the author's point)? If you say it's demonstrably impossible that someone can't be made more productive with opus4.5, then it should probably be up to you to demonstrate impossibility.
        • lijok 10mo ago
          How could it possibly be a skill issue? Have you tried in earnest to use opus4.5 for the problem you’re trying to solve? Not enough training data couldn’t be the problem - Bazel is not an esoteric domain. Unless you’re trying to do something esoteric.
      • deleted 10mo ago
• ookblah 10mo ago
  "LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were." lol. is this supposed to be like some sort of "gotcha"! yes? like maybe i am a really shitty programmer and always just wanted to hack things together. what it has allowed me to do is prevent burnout to some extent, outsource the "boring" parts and getting back to building things i like. also getting tired of these extreme takes but whatever, it's #1 so mission accomplished. llms are neither this or that. just another tool in the toolbox, one that has been frustrating in some contexts and a godsend in others and part of that process is figuring out where it excels and doesn't.
  • LAC-Tech 10mo ago
    Not really. I use LLMs for things I am not good at. But I also know I am not good at them. No one is good at everything. 100% fine.
    • ookblah 10mo ago
      hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk. i mean if you have imposter syndrome then this feeling will always be prevalent. how do you know what you are good at or not? i might be competent enough to have progressed this far in my career as in "results", but comparison to people i consider "good" devs always puts in that doubt. i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of claiming to be open minded makes a backhand comment where people who like llms might just must be a shitty programmer or whatever. i get the point, but that line doesn't quite land the way you think it does.
      • LAC-Tech 10mo ago
        hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk. Oh yeah that's entirely possible. I think mentioned it several times in the article. One always has to be open to the possibility that one is just ignorant. i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of claiming to be open minded makes a backhand comment where people who like llms might just must be a shitty programmer or whatever. It does somewhat depress me that even in a very short article, people can't figure out I am talking about the irritating LLM Evangelists, not everyone who uses LLMs. It's in the title. i get the point, but that line doesn't quite land the way you think it does. Landed well enough to #1 on this hell site :)
• wiener11 10mo ago
  Damn even reading that title shows how dumb i am !!
• lbrito 10mo ago
  I think it goes further than this. Some people - some developers, even - do not _like_ programming computers. In fact, many hate it. Those people welcome the LLM agent stuff because it delivers the end product without going through the necessary pain (from their pov) of programming.
  • frizlab 10mo ago
    I, for one, love programming (and passionately hate AI). Note I also think AI is bad for philosophical/ethical reasons.
  • supern0va 10mo ago
    While I believe this may be true, there are also just people that get more reward from building than from the act of writing code. That doesn't mean they hate writing code, but that the building comes first. I count myself in that camp. If I can build better/faster with reasonably equal quality, I'll trade off the joy of programming for the joy of more building, of more high level problem solving and thinking, etc. I've also seen the opposite: those that derive more joy from the programming and the cool engineering than from the product. And you see the opposite behavior from them, of course--such as selecting a solution that's cool and novel to build, rather than the simple, boring, but better alternative. I often find this type of engineer rather frustrating to work with, and coincidentally, they seem to be the most anti-AI type I've encountered.
    • lbrito 10mo ago
      Yeah, that's pretty much what I think too. I'm much more of the latter type you mention, but I think I have the enough acumen to be practical most times. Its always been the case that engineers come in many flavors, some more and some less business-inclined. The difference with AI imo is that it will (or already is) putting its trillion-dollar finger on the scale, such that there is less patience and space for people like me, and more for people like you.
• perfmode 10mo ago
  This is a fun piece to dissect because it's self-aware about being uncharitable, yet still commits the very sin it's criticizing. The author's central complaint is that LLM evangelists dismiss skeptics with psychological speculation ("you're afraid of being irrelevant"). Their response? Psychological speculation ("you're projecting insecurity about your coding skills"). This is tu quoque dressed up as insight. Fighting unfounded psychoanalysis with unfounded psychoanalysis doesn't refute anything. It just levels the playing field of bad arguments. The author gestures at this with "I am still willing to admit I am wrong" but the bulk of the piece is vibes-based counter-psychoanalysis, not engagement with evidence. It's a well-written "no u" that mistakes self-awareness ("I know this isn't charitable") for self-correction.
• morshu9001 10mo ago
  I see a lot more insecurity from people who refuse to use AI coding tools. My teammates amd I use this stuff all the time, and it's not making a statement, it's just an easier path sometimes.
• woah 10mo ago
  The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. Pro-LLM influencers are sometimes corny, but it's sort of like any other influencer, they are incentivized to make everything sound exciting to get clicks. Nobody was complaining about 3d printer influencers raving about how printing replacement dishwasher parts was going to change everything. LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even really cares about it. Given that using and prompting them is very much a garbage in/garbage out scenario, people let their social and political biases cloud their usage, and instead of helping it succeed, they try to collect "gotcha" moments, which doesn't reflect the workflow of someone using an LLM productively.
  • ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
    > The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. I can't agree with that. The pro-LLM side is relentlessly pushing everyone into using it, even when very few people want it (e.g. WhatsApp not even allowing people to turn it off). That smacks of insecurity to me. Anti-LLM people are happy to continue coding/writing/drawing without the new digital tools - that sounds like someone who knows what they're doing and feels secure about their abilities. > LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even really cares about it The stock market would disagree to the tune of a large sum of money. What the "anti" side care most about is being forced to pay for (typically hidden costs such as a percentage of your pension investments) and often forced to use "AI" despite knowing that the service is substantially worse than getting people to do the same job (e.g. "AI" support service agents)
    • tstrimple 10mo ago
      You cannot post anything positive about your experience with LLMs without being dogpiled by the anti-ai zealots. They are as predictable as the "But What About China!" crowd any time US emissions come up in a discussion. They are the "Nothing will work but nuclear!" folks who crop up in every single conversation about renewable energy. Their comments are exactly the same every single time regardless of the context and add nothing at all to the conversation.
• arnabgho 10mo ago
  "LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?" The people who were the best at something don't necessarily be the best at a new paradigm. Unlearning some principles and learning new ones might be painful exercise for some masters. Military history has shown that the masters of the new wave are not necessarily the masters of the previous wave we see the rise and downfall of several civilizations from Roman to Greek for being too sure of their old methods and old military equipments and strategy.
  • bagacrap 10mo ago
    Is that a long winded way of saying yes?
• hu3 10mo ago
  This is also bad evangelism, but on opposite side. Just because LLMs don't work for you outside of vibe-coding, doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. > LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Productive usage of LLMs in large scale projects become viable with excellent engineering (tests, patterns, documentation, clean code) so perhaps that question should also be asked to yourself.
  • j2kun 10mo ago
    I think you should read the article again, because this comment is a straw man vis-a-vis the article.
    • hu3 10mo ago
      Is it? The article starts from the premise that LLMs are only good for vibe-coding.
      • krapp 10mo ago
        No it doesn't. It starts from the premise that the author finds LLMs are good for limited, simple tasks with small contexts and clearly defined guidelines, and specifically not good for vibe-coding. And the author literally mentions that they aren't making universal claims about LLMs, but just speaking from personal experience.
        • hu3 10mo ago
          You're offering a very generous interpretation. To the point of extrapolating what's written. Allow me to exemplify: > I genuinely don't mind if other people vibe code. Go for it! > But that is not enough for the vocal proponents. It's the future! The author is okay for others to voice their positive opinion about LLMs as long as it is limited to vibe coding. It starts defining a gatekeeping threshold of what level of positive opinion is acceptable for others to have, according to the author.
• chadcmulligan 10mo ago
  I have been through this before (wherever/whenever the money seems to flow) - databases are bad, you should use couchbase etc, I was a db expert, the people advocating weren't, but they were very loud. The many, many evangelistic web development alternatives that come and go, all very loud. Now the latest - LLM's, like couchbase et al they have their place but the evangelists are not having any of it. I work a lot with doctors (writing software for them), I am very envious of their system of specialisation, eg this dude is such and such a specialist - he knows about it, listen to him. IT seems to be anyone who talks the loudest has a podium, separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult. One day we will have a system of qualifications I hope, but it seems a long way off.
• imadierich 10mo ago
  [dead]
• anonym29 10mo ago
  I don't mind weighing in as someone who could fairly be categorized as both an LLM evangelist and "not an experienced dev". It's a lot like why I've been bullish on Tesla's approach to FSD even as someone who owned an AP1 vehicle that objectively was NOT "self-driving" in any sense of the word: it's less about where the technology is right now, or even the speed the technology is currently improving at, and more about how the technology is now present to enable acceleration in the rate of improvement of performance, paired with the reality of us observing exactly that. Like FSD V12 to V14, the last several years in AI can only be characterized as an unprecedented rate of improvement, very much like scientific advancement throughout human society. It took us millions of years to evolve into humans. Hundreds of thousands to develop language. Tens of thousands to develop writing. Thousands to develop the printing press. Hundreds to develop typewriters. Decades to develop computers. Years to go from the 8086 to the modern workstations of today. The time horizon of tasks AI agents can now reliably perform is now doubling every 4 months, per METR. Do frontier models know more than human experts in all domains right now? Absolutely not. But they already know far more than any individual human expert outside that human's domain(s) of expertise. I've been passionate about technology for nearly two decades, working in the technology industry for close to a decade. I'm a security guy, not a dev. I have over half a dozen CVEs and countless private vuln disclosures. I can and do write code myself - I've been writing scripts for various network tasks for a decade before ChatGPT ever came into existence. That said, it absolutely is a better dev than me. But specialized harnesses paired with frontier models are also better security engineers than I am, dollar for dollar versus my cost. They're better pentesters than me, for the relative costs. These statements were not true at all without accounting for cost two years ago. Two years from now, I am fully expecting them to just be outright better at security engineering, pentesting, SCA than I am, without accounting for cost, yet I also expect they will cost less then than they do now. A year ago, OpenAI's o1 was still almost brand new, test-time compute was this revolutionary new idea. Everyone thought you needed tens of billions to train a model as good as o1, it was still a week before Deepseek released R1. Now, o1's price/performance seems like a distant bad dream. I had always joked that one quarter in tech saw as much change as like 1 year in "the real world". For AI, it feels more like we're seeing more change every month than we do every year in "the real world", and I'd bet on that accelerating, too. I don't think experienced devs still preferring to architect and write code themselves are coping at all. I still have to fix bugs in AI-generated code myself. But I do think it's short sighted to not look at the trajectory and see the writing on the wall over the next 5 years. Stanford's $18/hr pentester that outperforms 9/10 humans should have every pentester figuring out what they're going to be doing when it doubles in performance and halves in cost again over the next year, just like human Uber drivers should be reading Motortrend's (historically a vocal critic of Tesla and FSD) 2026 Best Driver Assistance System and figuring out what they're going to do next. Experienced devs should be looking at how quickly we came from text-davinci-003 to Opus 4.5 and considering what their economic utility will look like in 2030.
• czhu12 10mo ago
  To be fair to both sides, it really is hard to tell if we're in the world of "you'll be left behind if you don't learn crypto" with crypto or "you'll be left behind if you don't learn how to drive" with cars One of those statements is made in good faith, and the other is made out of insecurity. But we'll probably only really be able to tell looking backwards.
  • tracerbulletx 10mo ago
    I don't really see the point in worrying about prompting, and agents and mcps, and skills and all this as a skill to learn. They're trivial if you're already a developer and if it gets good enough that you don't need to know software engineering, there's not going to be anything to learn. Setting it up is a subset of software engineering so it will be able to do that its self once it can solve problems reliably without someone to understand what's going on to check it.
  • lunar_mycroft 10mo ago
    As an aside, both those statements were wrong. People who learned to drive well after cars were widely adopted were at no particular disadvantage when and if they decided to adopt the technology. You can see this is true by noting that at this point, no one alive learned to drive when cars first came out.
• Havoc 10mo ago
  > It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong. Can’t speak for others but that’s not what I’d understand (or do) as vibecoding. If you’re babysitting it every inch of the way then yeah sure I can see how it might not be productive relative to doing it yourself. If you’re constantly fighting the LLM because you have a very specific notion of what each line should look like it won’t be a good time. Better to spec out some assumptions, some desired outcomes, tech to be used, maybe the core data structure, ask the llm what else it needs to connect the dots, add that and then let it go
• wewewedxfgdf 10mo ago
  Your experience that "AI coding is bad" will match your belief that "AI coding is bad".
  • LAC-Tech 10mo ago
    Maybe get an LLM to summarise the article for you?
• throwawayffffas 10mo ago
  > But doing "prompt-driven development" or "vibe coding" with an Agentic LLM was an incredibly disapointing experience for me. It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong. All the while I sat there feeling dumber and dumber, as my tokens drained away. Yeah I find they are useful for large sweeping changes, introducing new features and stuff, mostly because they write a lot of the boilerplate, granted with some errors. But for small fiddly changes they suck, you will have a much easier time doing these changes your self.
• sarchertech 10mo ago
  I just want some externally verifiable numbers. If AI is a 10x improvement, we should be seeing new operating systems. If it’s 5x we should see new game engines. If it’s 2x we should see massive amounts of new features for popular open source projects. If it’s less than that, then it’s more like adding syntax highlighting or moving from Java to Ruby on Rails. Both of those were nice, but people weren’t breathlessly shouting about being left behind.
  • falloutx 10mo ago
    I dont think that will happen, Not at least now. I dont even think AI would be suitable for creating an OS or a game engine. What seems to be increasing is no of saas products asking for subscriptions and most of the productivity, if any, is being used to add AI features to the apps.
• marssaxman 10mo ago
  I remember a similarly aggressive evangelism about self-driving cars several years ago. I suppose it's not so pleasant, when you feel like you've seen a prophetic glimpse of a brilliant future, to deal with skeptics who don't understand your vision and refuse to give your predictions the credit they deserve. Of course we need a few people to get wildly overexcited about new possibilities, so they will go make all the early mistakes which show the rest of us what the new thing can and cannot actually do; likewise, we need most of us to feel skeptical and stick to what already works, so we don't all run off a cliff together by mistake.
• stephc_int13 10mo ago
  I tend to share the sentiment of the author. I think that coding assistants tend to quite good as long as what you ask is close to the training data. Anything novel and the quality if falling off rapidly. So, if you are like Antirez and ask for a Linenoize improvement that has already be seen many times by the LLM at training time, the result will seem magical, but that is largely an illusion, IMO.
  • theshrike79 10mo ago
    But how many times a week are you truely doing something novel? A thing that nobody in the world (or the LLM training data) has done before?
  • selfhoster11 10mo ago
    Heads up that this is "more true" for non-reasoning LLMs. Reasoning gives an LLM a lot more runway to respond to out of distribution inputs by devoting more compute on understanding the code it's changing, and to play with ideas on how to change it before it commits.
• bergutman 10mo ago
  ITT: A bunch of people who think they're god's gift to Earth.
• tracerbulletx 10mo ago
  I see how cool and powerful they're getting, but agree there is a huge insecurity element in the evangelism. Everyone wants to be seen as the one who will get a seat running the llms when the music stops playing.
• christina97 10mo ago
  Whatever your personal feeling, judgement, or conviction on this matter; do not dismiss the other side because of a couple wingnuts saying crazy stuff (you can find them on both extremes as well as the middle). Stay curious as to why people have their own conviction, and seek the truth!
• elzbardico 10mo ago
  What I really like about LLMs is that you can do pair programming without having to deal with humans.
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• dzonga 10mo ago
  if A.I maximalist gospel was true - we would see a company raising $10M Series A | Seed (these days) spend 60% on A.I, 30% on Humans and 10% on operations but I can bet you my sole penny that's not happening - so we know someone is tryna sell us a polished turd as a diamond
  • lijok 10mo ago
    At no point in history has humanity ever cut back on spending after some constraint got alleviated. Exact opposite, we always ramp spending up to chase new possibilities. If A.I maximalism gospel was true we would see companies raising absurd seed and A rounds in record numbers. Which is exactly what we’re seeing
• jsnider3 10mo ago
  Whatever standard of code quality you want, if it hasn't reached it yet, it will get there very soon.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• shmerl 10mo ago
  > It's projection. Their evangelism is born of insecurity. It's fear, but of different kind. Those who are most aggressive and pushy about it are those who invested too much [someone else's] money in it and are scared angry investors will come for their hides when reality won't match their expectations.
• joshcsimmons 10mo ago
  Evangelism of a new technique and tool for doing work is insecure? I agree it’s been oversold but it’s natural to be pretty excited about the tech.
• dcre 10mo ago
  I don't get who is saying this dreaded "you'll be left behind." The only place I see that is from straight-up slop accounts in the Twitter algo feed. Surely you're not letting those people make you feel bad. > You see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive without it. You also see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive with it, so I don't know what this is supposed to prove. The inverse argument is just as easy to make and just as spurious.
• Aperocky 10mo ago
  > That doing this is it's own skill and I have not spent enough time with it. Yeah, this. I sucked (still sucks?) at it too, I spent countless hours correcting them. And throwing away hours of "work" they made, And even had them nuking the workplace a couple times (thankfully, they were siloed). I still feel like I'm wasting too much time way too often and trying new things constantly. But I always thought I can learn and improve on this tool and its associated ecosystem as much as the other programming tools and languages and frameworks I learned over the years.
• anilgulecha 10mo ago
  "I am still willing to admit I am wrong. That I'm not holding the GPS properly. That navigating with real-time satellite data is its own skill and I have not spent enough time with it. I have changed how I get around before, and I'm sure I will do so again. Map-reading evangelists, are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at driving a car? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were."
• johnnienaked 10mo ago
  See the same thing in the bitcoin space. If you ask them to explain the value to you, you're a moronic, behind-the-times, luddite boomer who just doesn't understand. Not to mention poor! I'll remain skeptical and let the technology speak for itself, if it ever does.
• mnming 10mo ago
  I feel any LLM discussion without mentioning concrete tooling choices are unproductive. Toolings are evolving so fast, many statements that were accurate two months ago are simply wrong today.
  • theshrike79 10mo ago
    It's a lot different to "vibe code" by copypasting crap from a browser window to an editor vs using an agentic LLM with full access to the source and tools to search for documentation, run scripts etc. And one major thing is language. Some languages (Rust, React) are so complex and nuanced that LLMs struggle with them - as do humans. Agentic LLMs will eventually solve the problem you've given them but the solution might be a bit wonky. Compare that to LLMs writing Python or Go. With Go there's just one way to write a loop, it can't get confused with that. The way to write and format the language has been exactly the same since the beginning. Same with Python, it's pretty lenient on how you write it (objects vs functional) but there are well-estabilished standards on how to do things and it's an old language (34 years btw). Most of Python 2.x is still valid Python 3.
• bicepjai 10mo ago
  I think the author slips into the same pattern he’s criticizing. He says LLM fans shouldn’t label skeptics as “afraid” then he turns around and labels the fans as “insecure” or “not very good at programming.” It’s the same move; guessing what’s going on in someone’s head instead of sticking to what actually happened and what the tools can or can’t do. The simpler truth is LLMs are great in some cases and painful in others. They shine on boilerplate and tests. They struggle when the domain is unusual, requirements are fuzzy; mistakes are made, you pay a big babysitting tax. Instead of psychoanalyzing each other, people should share concrete examples
  • bagacrap 10mo ago
    It's not fans that he's criticizing but evangelists.
    • bicepjai 10mo ago
      Thanks for pointing it out. I actually meant evangelists
• gaigalas 10mo ago
  > You tried agentic coding. You realised it was better at programming than you are. We need to drop this competition paradigm ASAP.
• computerex 10mo ago
  > LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were. Or maybe the author is bad at programming AND bad at agentic coding. That’s more likely than the possibility that all llm evangelists are terrible coders.
• northfield27 10mo ago
  This has been my experience as well. What I use LLMs for I don't use Claude Code, Codex or any other hyped-up, VC-approved, buzzword-compliant, productivity-theater SF tool for actual day-to-day coding. I just use ChatGPT outside of my editor in browser. The only tasks that I feel LLMs right now can do somewhat-reliably without human supervision include: 1. Search: To search and compare different things; that is boring to do manually. As an example, I checked how M1 Pro compares to M4. ChatGPT crawls the web to compare both the processors on similar specs and provides a conclusion but I need to check and verify the claims it reached by briefly reading the sources. 2. Documentation: I have to do things on time so I offload reading documentations for syntax or how-to-do-it-with-this-library to ChatGPT. 3. Single task scripts: I let ChatGPT create me boring and one-time-use python scripts for trivial tasks. I don't spend ChatGPT's limited but free GPT-5-(latest-model) tokens for such trivial tasks - I have a special keybinding on my mac that fires up ChatGPT in incognito for me. But don't get me wrong, I find LLMs pretty useful for PoC-level stuff and I do like instructing my agents to make me a half-baked PoC that makes me feel like a revolutionary SF-founder for an afternoon before I delete the repo and go back to writing real code like a responsible adult. Because nothing says ‘disruptive genius’ like ctrl+z and moving on. --- Why I find vibe coding in production not useful Like sean goedecke, I feel that using LLMs in production is not useful and (in fact) anti-productive because it gives junior engineer's free pass to push code without actually learning/reading it (Humans often tend to chose the easiest path to accomplish given problem). And due to this, its a pain to review junior PR these days. I have two reasons why LLMs are not good at production coding: 1. Context: There are enough discussions out on the internet that says LLMs are limited by context. Humans are better because they can handle and work with multiple contexts in mind - an LLMs knows how to solve the user problem, but the engineer knows what business problem this piece of code solves, in which context the code will run, with other process on same service and in which context of other services, what company code idioms to follow while writing code and what will make your pair-programmer think that you are smart. 2. Lack of deterministic output: I would not over-simply by saying its just a probabilistic system but you can feel it right? It would sometimes give correct, decent and sometimes wrong answers for the same prompt. Sometimes it would enlighten you with a very interesting insight/perspective and other times it would be as dumb as a toaster trying to file your taxes - consistently inconsistent (when you reached context rot), yet somehow still sold as “intelligent.” --- A brief rant My manager fear-mongers me nearly everyday saying LLMs are really good at coding, there are at-most 10 years left to earn as programmer and stuff. The fact he is hasn't touched coding in last 8 years. He thinks his half-baked trivial ideas translated to code by an overpriced probabilistic system is a breakthrough for his company. I am non-native english speaker and you would have probably sensed that by now. I often get tasks to write documentations, and every time my manager doesn't understand something, he takes it as a chance to break my confidence saying that you are bad at using LLM for language related tasks because my english is poor. But (at-least right now) I strongly feel this is just a hype: - CEOs want to get-rich-quick or they want to increase company profits by "ai-enabling" it and getting salary hikes. - Companies are hyping this tech to recalibrate engineer salaries that has skyrocketed since covid. - My manager wants to make me feel replaceable.
• bagacrap 10mo ago
  I generally agree with this article and appreciate the articulation of some points that were in my head but not well formed. That said, practically speaking, you can just ignore the evangelists and even use it as a signal for people you should ignore. The unfortunate thing is how it's affecting our careers, since it's apparently so alluring for Management types to buy the hype and start trying to micro manage devs.
• dent9 10mo ago
  Using LLM for programming work is a skill that takes practice and sometimes a little luck, just like Google searching for help with programming work. It takes practice to figure out which things the LLM handles well and how best to present your problems to the LLM to get a good result. It take luck that the specific things you're trying to get results for are things the LLM actually can handle well.