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"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?" No.
by 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 agoI do wonder if C programmers ever asked that of Python devs back in the day.
- chadcmulligan 10mo agoStill do
- morshu9001 10mo agoThis 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 agoAny good engineer can become a good engineer in any language.
- christophilus 10mo agoExcept brainfuck and Haskell.
- zahlman 10mo agoBack 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 agoNo, 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?
- simonw 10mo agoThe second.
- daveguy 10mo agoAgreed, but do you honestly think LLMs have reached the level of average programmer? Or is it more a matter of "they can churn out code until I see something that is close enough and I'll make the last few edits"? Also curious if you publish your working setup or if it changes as fast as the LLMs? Seems like you may have a more stable setup than most given how you are developing tools in the space.
- jason_oster 10mo agoHonestly? LLMs are currently above average at programming. We've all been through The Daily WTF at least once. That's representative of the average. (Although some examples are more egregious than others.)
- ben_w 10mo ago> The Daily WTF at least once. That's representative of the average I'd say The Daily WTF are the more spectacularly weird and wrong, not representative; I've seen a few things deserving to be on their site in real life*, but the average I've seen has been much better than that. It's difficult to be sure, but I think these models are roughly like someone with 1-3 years of experience, though the worst codebase(s) I've seen have been from person(s) who somehow lasted a decade or two in the industry. * 1000 lines inside an always-true if-block, a pantheon of god classes that poorly re-invent the concept of named properties, copy-pasting class files rather than subclassing even after I'd added comments about needing to de-duplicate things in them, and that was all the same project.
- edfletcher_t137 10mo agoCame here to comment on this line: it completely changes the tone of the article. It's fairly reasonable and neutral until we get here, upon which the antagonism is jarringly clear. In fact I would posit this is the central crux of the post: OP does not believe those LLM evangelists were ever good programmers. As others have already noted[1], many well-known excellent programmers - including yourself! and now even Linus! - would beg to differ. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoLinus doesn't seem like an LLM evangelist: "Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters" at https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/linus_torvalds_vibe_coding/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/linus_torvalds_vibe_c...
- bagacrap 10mo ago"insecure" in the title didn't set the tone for you?
- Krei-se 10mo agoYou can stop questioning yourself early whether you are a good programmer just by realizing you code in python.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]