3 ms·

> All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of ut

> All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. There are multiple sections that talk directly about utility. Here's one of them: [0] But, sure. I'll bite. Here's the third paragraph of the first part of the essay [1]: This is *bullshit* about *bullshit machines*, and I mean it. It is neither balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online. Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play. I'd say that the specific sort of "utility" discussion that you're probably looking for would be classified as "boosterism". [2] > Now it can scale with power and compute. Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3]. [0] <https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess#models-are-smart https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...> [1] <https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...> [2] Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions. [3] <https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/ https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/>

keeda 6mo ago
[0] is a throwaway paragraph that handwaves at second-hand accounts of generic things LLMs can do, with no further discussion, apparently because he (surprisingly!) has almost no first-hand experience with them. Then there are 10 pages of negativity with dozens of links to stuff that has been discussed to death here and in media. The "negative spaces" he's filling are already overflowing. His lack of personal experience with LLMs was the most disappointing aspect, because he does not really know what we're dealing with. He's just going off what he's read / heard. So again, where's the incisive insight? Now, here's a concrete example of what I mean by utility: a single person being able to rewrite an entire open source project from scratch in a few days just so it could be relicensed. Is that good or bad? I don't know! Is it a stupefying example of what's possible? Yes! Is that "breathless boosterism?" Only if you ignore the infinite nuances involved. > Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3]. Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. As an example, it still mentions the METR study from 2025 without mentioning the very pertinent follow-up from just a couple of months back... which is not very surprising to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145601 ;-) It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports, which is pertinent to my original point: LLMs are simply an amplifier of your existing software discipline. Teams with strong software discipline see amazing speedups, those with poor discipline sees increased outages. And, to my original point, who knows what good software discipline looks like? Hint: it's not the capital class.
- simoncion 6mo ago
  > His lack of personal experience with LLMs... You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them, it seems. Go re-read Section 1.5 "Models are Idiots". Make sure to read the footnotes. They're sure to address most of the counterarguments you might make. > Is that "breathless boosterism?" How you phrased it? Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few. Also, you missed the part where I said Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions. > Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. ... It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports... Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one. Here's the summary, straight from the author's keyboard: * Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct. * No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree. * You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature. * If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.
  - keeda 6mo ago
    > You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them... Not really, those are exactly the things said by people who dabble with LLMs a little and turn to "breathless naysaying" without any effort to really figure out this new technology. I mean, the series literally ends with "maybe I'll try to code with it." > Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few. Not really, I did say "Is it good or bad? I don't know!" and literally mentioned the infinite nuances. I did not want this to become a tangent about those nuances (that's what I hoped would be in TFA) but I do know that being able to write or rewrite entire projects single-handedly is tremendous utility. > Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one. Not really, just that I've already discussed all the points in that piece in past comments with way more studies on "empirical evidence on LLM coding impact" with way more nuance. If you want to follow the threads in the comment I linked, you'll come across some of those comments. > You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature. Not really, the repeated message in all the latest reports like DORA and DX and CircleCI (which your link mentions but glosses over) very clearly indicates that using LLMs with strong software development fundamentals (what I called "discipline") is a huge force multiplier. See point 3 of this link as a representative example: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/blog/generative-ai/a-thoughtworks-perspective-on-circleci-s-2026-state-of-software- https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/blog/generative-... For these teams, productivity will literally be proportional to their tokens rather than their devs, because each dev is so highly leveraged. > If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens. Yes, but at this point it's unlikely to be a silver bullet, and I never claimed it would be. What I am saying is that it is a huge accelerant, but needs steering by skilled operators, engineers who know the discipline but also understand how to work with AI. And in my experience it takes a surprising amount of time and practice to learn how to leverage AI effectively. Which aphyr clearly has not done. Which is why this series is such a disappointment.

keeda 6mo ago

[0] is a throwaway paragraph that handwaves at second-hand accounts of generic things LLMs can do, with no further discussion, apparently because he (surprisingly!) has almost no first-hand experience with them. Then there are 10 pages of negativity with dozens of links to stuff that has been discussed to death here and in media. The "negative spaces" he's filling are already overflowing. His lack of personal experience with LLMs was the most disappointing aspect, because he does not really know what we're dealing with. He's just going off what he's read / heard. So again, where's the incisive insight? Now, here's a concrete example of what I mean by utility: a single person being able to rewrite an entire open source project from scratch in a few days just so it could be relicensed. Is that good or bad? I don't know! Is it a stupefying example of what's possible? Yes! Is that "breathless boosterism?" Only if you ignore the infinite nuances involved. > Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3]. Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. As an example, it still mentions the METR study from 2025 without mentioning the very pertinent follow-up from just a couple of months back... which is not very surprising to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145601 ;-) It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports, which is pertinent to my original point: LLMs are simply an amplifier of your existing software discipline. Teams with strong software discipline see amazing speedups, those with poor discipline sees increased outages. And, to my original point, who knows what good software discipline looks like? Hint: it's not the capital class.

simoncion 6mo ago
> His lack of personal experience with LLMs... You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them, it seems. Go re-read Section 1.5 "Models are Idiots". Make sure to read the footnotes. They're sure to address most of the counterarguments you might make. > Is that "breathless boosterism?" How you phrased it? Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few. Also, you missed the part where I said Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions. > Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. ... It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports... Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one. Here's the summary, straight from the author's keyboard: * Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct. * No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree. * You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature. * If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.
- keeda 6mo ago
  > You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them... Not really, those are exactly the things said by people who dabble with LLMs a little and turn to "breathless naysaying" without any effort to really figure out this new technology. I mean, the series literally ends with "maybe I'll try to code with it." > Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few. Not really, I did say "Is it good or bad? I don't know!" and literally mentioned the infinite nuances. I did not want this to become a tangent about those nuances (that's what I hoped would be in TFA) but I do know that being able to write or rewrite entire projects single-handedly is tremendous utility. > Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one. Not really, just that I've already discussed all the points in that piece in past comments with way more studies on "empirical evidence on LLM coding impact" with way more nuance. If you want to follow the threads in the comment I linked, you'll come across some of those comments. > You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature. Not really, the repeated message in all the latest reports like DORA and DX and CircleCI (which your link mentions but glosses over) very clearly indicates that using LLMs with strong software development fundamentals (what I called "discipline") is a huge force multiplier. See point 3 of this link as a representative example: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/blog/generative-ai/a-thoughtworks-perspective-on-circleci-s-2026-state-of-software- https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/blog/generative-... For these teams, productivity will literally be proportional to their tokens rather than their devs, because each dev is so highly leveraged. > If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens. Yes, but at this point it's unlikely to be a silver bullet, and I never claimed it would be. What I am saying is that it is a huge accelerant, but needs steering by skilled operators, engineers who know the discipline but also understand how to work with AI. And in my experience it takes a surprising amount of time and practice to learn how to leverage AI effectively. Which aphyr clearly has not done. Which is why this series is such a disappointment.