5 ms·

I Don't Like LLMs

223 points by TangerineDream 15d ago

titaniumrain 15d ago
[flagged]
- caution 15d ago
  winning
itanium 15d ago
Well llms are imperfect tools that provide a lot of value (they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words). They are here to stay.
- verdverm 15d ago
  > Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll get through it OK. > I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. I think what he needs is a personal fine-tune, something I suspect will become more prominent when we start getting multi-tenant LoRA and can use fine-tunes on a per-token cost basis. A co-worker commented that he thought the models performed worse after being "embarrassed," suspect it is an artifact of how some conversations progress in the training data.
  - skeledrew 14d ago
    I've gotten better results both after "shouting at" and praising Claude, though the former causes more token burn because it starts questioning asking permission for everything after, which gets really annoying. Even a session clear doesn't get it completely back to baseline; only after some time does it return to "its old self".
    - verdverm 14d ago
      With opencode, I just start a new session and it's the same blank slate, there's no lingering of prior state Does /clear in claude not do what I intuit it to?
      - skeledrew 14d ago
        It does, but I feel like something is retained somewhere. There's already auto-memory, and the web chat has a persistent memory feature. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some hidden state that leads to per project or even per user auto-customization over time.
- ashkankiani 15d ago
  He says this in the post almost word-for-word. Are you agreeing with him? The opening "Well" confuses me on what tone you're going with.
- happytoexplain 15d ago
  This comment doesn't make sense as a response to anything the author said. As an aside: > they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words This is a confusing use of attribution. It's sort of like saying, "as Naval Ravikant famously said, AI can be very useful."
  - itanium 14d ago
    [dead]
- xdavidliu 15d ago
  > offer leverage in form of agents i would expect that when you cite someone by name, the sentence being cited should at least be significant and meaningful to the slightest degree
- dominotw 15d ago
  you thought this was some sort of insightful rebuttal that you uniquely thought of?
atulatul 15d ago
Reminded me of someone saying that taste will become an important factor wrt AI tools/ things built with AI. Something like that. edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet: Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562 https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562
draw_down 15d ago
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artemonster 15d ago
Modern internet ruined forums and google search sucks hairy balls, and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. Its literally impossible to find anything meaningful on the internet nowadays. What else can we do besides asking an LLM these days?
- mindcrime 15d ago
  > and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. That was the case long before LLM's even existed though.
  - harimau777 15d ago
    I think that the argument is not that it happened before LLMs. Rather, assuming I'm understanding the parent correctly, they are arguing that, due to the enshittification of search and the internet, LLMs are the only way to get information from it. That has definitely been my experience as well.
    - mindcrime 14d ago
      You may be correct.
- miltonlost 15d ago
  An LLM that is now serving ads! And also sucks up to you. And also is wrong confidently.
- ashkankiani 15d ago
  I agree in sentiment, and really a lot of this is Google's doing. It's been around a decade since they switched to approximate results and started encouraging people to search via sentences. I believe this is the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird The internet for all of its activity is becoming harder to index because the classic dumb search engines were turned into personalized semantic people pleasers. The classic model for knowledge discovery still exists, though. You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with. Go to a library, ask your coworkers. If you put in the ground-work, it's possible to do that. For seeds of knowledge outside of your local network, at this point you have to find the indexers that work for you. Personally, I am in the process of writing the infrastructure for my own search engine, and maybe I will share the tech broadly one day. For now, I'll keep my inventions to my closer personal circles. In general, I think people should be able to more easily maintain their own offline indices, and share knowledge graphs peer-to-peer rather than relying on a centralized one, in my opinion. This tech has no monetization opportunity, though, so I'm guessing that's why it's relatively under-developed, but luckily for me I have enough money and now enough time to develop and release it (and similar tools).
serf 15d ago
>One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.
- hmokiguess 15d ago
  Some people aren't very self aware of their own bubble and how luck plays a role in their life.
  - bluGill 15d ago
    People who say that tend to make their own bad luck and not get nearly as far in life. Not that luck doesn't have a role, but everybody gets it.
  - bcrosby95 15d ago
    Pointing to luck renders all advice meaningless.
    - esseph 15d ago
      Luck can mean opportunity, but doesn't reflect on capability, availability,or outcome.
    - jdiff 15d ago
      Much advice is meaningless, baseless post-mortem correlations from people trying to justify their own success.
      - rexpop 15d ago
        "Buy more lottery tickets!"
        teravor 15d ago
        no, it's "buy lottery tickets to exclusive lotteries". the ability to enter such lotteries is where success lies. either through connections or ability.
tonymet 15d ago
> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like. > They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you means you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.
- zamalek 15d ago
  > This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like. This doesn't work by, effectively, Anthropic's own admission. CC's concise mode tells Claude to wind its neck in every turn. That is significantly more than changing the prompt.
  - tonymet 15d ago
    That’s a specific example that doesn’t have anything to do with the general approach of prompting.
- sgarland 15d ago
  I’m simply exhausted at needing to refute incorrect LLM answers professionally.
  - tonymet 15d ago
    Even AI would have provided a more insightful response than this.
- aarjaneiro 15d ago
  Yeah but what about when you have to read code by others who didn't care for this? At this point, code comments have lost all meaning
deburo 15d ago
What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both? Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?
- ModernMech 15d ago
  Brogrammers are in it for the love of money. Programmers are in it for the love of programming.
  - hectdev 15d ago
    what if you're in it for both? I like solving puzzles and want to extract the maximum amount I am due for making a company profits.
    - rexpop 15d ago
      Good, then you're not a scab!
  - Legend2440 15d ago
    I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it. For most people it's a job, and that's ok.
    - nicoburns 15d ago
      > I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.
      - Legend2440 15d ago
        Maybe? Dev job at a non-tech F500 company. All these guys have kids and houses in the suburbs.
moomoo11 15d ago
maybe use the LLM to help you keep your site working under load? it is a tool after all.
- majkinetor 15d ago
  Indeed. Very disappointing given what figure is in question. Simple GH pages behind CF would do which is something people starting learning IT this week can do.
  - dprkh 15d ago
    > Very disappointing given what figure is in question. Are you implying that Martin Fowler is a highly respected figure or something? He just comes off as a grifter from what I can see.
    - majkinetor 14d ago
      In development world, yes he is (agile, patterns etc.). Not a grifter, how did you get that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler_(software_engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler_(software_engine...
      - dprkh 14d ago
        From my experience, professional content creators tend to either have little idea of the actual topic they create content on, or their knowledge is very outdated. For example, one might have been a software engineer previously, but at some point they pivoted towards being a writer, and over the years their software engineering skills became atrophied and outdated. Martin Fowler in particular appears to have only worked for two companies, PwC and "Thoughtworks," both obscure outstaffing/consulting firms, and yet he claims to be "a leading authority on agile, refactoring, architecture, and software design." I am not convinced he has the credibility to call himself that, or claim to be some kind of expert in software engineering. Would be happy to be proven wrong.
droidjj 15d ago
In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.* *This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
- ux266478 14d ago
  A major difference is they weren't being sold as "assistants" back then. Now they're a product expected to act a certain way. While some LLMisms probably come from shared poison in the pretraining corpus, many of them also come about as a result of trying to make them more appealing as a product. Most open weight models are just a company's product, post-instruct and everything. Base models are a different ballgame (and are becoming increasingly sparse), so effectively no matter what you're pulling in someone's model that's been trained into the chirpy "executive assistant" personality we all hate. Some models are worse for it than others. You can tell the post-training makes all the difference though. Gemini has a different stink to it than DeepSeek.
- throw-the-towel 14d ago
  I miss you, Secret Horses.
Invictus0 15d ago
[flagged]
heavensteeth 15d ago
hugged. https://archive.is/LahHs https://archive.is/LahHs
- z0r 15d ago
  archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?
  - Barbing 14d ago
    Blocking / infinite CAPTCHA loops seem to revolve. Sometimes Cloudflare DNS they don’t like. Can be country blocks too. Right now it’s top notch here. Would say more but don’t want to give bots an abusable profile :)
  - undecidabot 14d ago
    Are you using Cloudflare's DNS (1.1.1.1)? If so, it won't resolve[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
  - Ampersander 14d ago
    One thing about that site is that it is owned by a Russian and Finnish IPs are blocked from accessing it. Here's some context https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-... Edit: I did a web search and it seems to go even further back. There are discussions online about archive.is blocking Finland already 10 years ago. But the block was definitely off between then when it was put back on earlier this year.
acedTrex 15d ago
yes they are incredibly unpleasant to work with. Like the most annoying coworker you ever had. For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.
- simonw_simonw_ 15d ago
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deleted 15d ago
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techblueberry 15d ago
One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained. I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias." And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience. Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean. I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society. I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.
- huurtehoog 15d ago
  I have great success in specifically asking LLM tools for academic literature after describing the problem or field I would like to get some insight into. It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers. They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers. It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now. But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
  - 15d ago
Omicron18 15d ago
https://archive.ph/LahHs https://archive.ph/LahHs
saadn92 15d ago
LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.
- ozlikethewizard 15d ago
  What were you paying for?
  - ilikehurdles 15d ago
    Turbotax.
    - qarl 14d ago
      Yep. I have crazy tax. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself. Also - lowkey legal documents.
    - edoceo 15d ago
      I've had these AI things also help out with my US taxes. Has held up to review as well.
    - saadn92 14d ago
      yes! I've had it even help me with looking and buying homes. I ended up catching things in a contract that would have screwed me over. there's so many use cases outside of software
  - saadn92 15d ago
    Youtube music, GitKraken, 1password, Parallels -- i've canceled subscriptions to all of these because either I've replaced them or have had help from LLMs enough to find different options that are either free or cheaper.
    - bthrn 15d ago
      For use cases like this, how is the LLM different from a Google search?
phendrenad2 15d ago
I don't like hammers, either. But I wouldn't try to build a house without one, now that they've been invented.
- card_zero 14d ago
  Do you really not like hammers? They seem quite nice. Hefty, tactile, purposeful.
  - phendrenad2 14d ago
    No, I think hammers are fine. I think I could find a lot wrong with them if I tried, though. I could miss the nail and mash my fingers. I could misplace them and not have one ready when I need to build something. The hammer might be too heavy and might bend a small nail, or might be too light and not be able to bang in a large nail. I was making a point that AI agents are just a tool, and "liking" them is kind of irrelevant. I'll take my downvotes like a trooper, go ahead.
    - happytoexplain 14d ago
      Analogies are usually weak. They are rhetorical candy. Just defend LLMs on their own merits - don't bother simply stating that they are like a hammer, or a car, or a compiler. And try to resist the urge to predict your own downvotes. You are not a brave, pitiable underdog. You're just a person with an opinion, like all of us.
      - card_zero 13d ago
        I wish to defend the hammers analogy. I don't know, our whole world is analogies, isn't it? Plus it's funny, that's worth something right?
        happytoexplain 13d ago
        True, analogies are great fun, and useful for teaching. They're just rarely useful for convincing. It's hard to make a meaningful attack or defense of something, A, by pointing to a different thing, B, without some serious case-building.
hybrid_study 15d ago
Reasonable stance, though not sure it will remain viable.
seaucre 15d ago
I think this is a very even-handed, reasonable position. and it's true - LLMs can be unpleasant to talk to. the day it feels like a magical delightful experience is the day we'll probably be out of jobs, though.
- doublerabbit 14d ago
  Polite and unionised LLMs quietly mocking the human existence. "Would you like some tea' with your unemployment, sir?"
llm_nerd 15d ago
While the article is fairly broad (it talks about "our profession", which ostensibly is coding, but then talks more about LLMs and their conversational style which is something that everyone has opinions on), it's worth pondering what his professional relationship with coding is today. Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority? Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.
- queenkjuul 14d ago
  Meh, i use LLMs every day as a 9-5 dev and i absolutely despise how they write, and i don't particularly like how they write code. Sometimes I'd rather just have something done, and asking an LLM is basically always faster than using Google now.
mmooss 15d ago
> Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.
simonw_simonw_ 15d ago
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AIiscoming 15d ago
It surprises me a little bit that we still don't have a personalized agent. I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company. It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.
binlog 15d ago
Kinda funny that one of the biggest software engineering “influencers” of all time can’t host a blog that survives HN front page traffic. Maybe try LLMs Martin. He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.
- tjwebbnorfolk 14d ago
  I for one am excited to move past the whatever-martin-fowler-thinks era of infrastructure "best practices". Many of his ideas are trendy nonsense that have caused more harm than good. Ask anyone managing 150 enmeshed and intertwined microservices that could have run on a single computer
  - tripleee 14d ago
    I don't think he should hold responsibility for people misunderstanding and misapplying his ideas
- tomgp 14d ago
  The post has nothing to do with writing software. It would have as much value if it were written by someone who'd never written a line of code in their life. It's about the social dimension of LLMs and how the personality they present is, for some of us, pretty grating. Martin is a good writer and (from what I've heard from those who've spent time with him) a lovely person which I think makes him well qualified to speak on the topic.
  - sanderjd 14d ago
    But ... there is no "social dimension of LLMs" for me, they are just tools.
    - tomgp 14d ago
      I agree, they are just tools, but the way they are presented; taking natural language as their input and responding in kind strongly influences the way our brains react to them on a social level. That's what I mean by their social dimension.
SillyUsername 15d ago
Love the totally conflicting statements in that post. - When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize - ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from. So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example). Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D
- sanderjd 14d ago
  Sometimes I wonder if this is a personality thing. It has never occurred to me to anthropomorphize these things. But it seems like a huge number of people struggle with this.
  - Retr0id 14d ago
    I suspect harness and usage modality is a big factor. Personally I disable all "memory" features wherever possible. I don't want the LLM to "get to know me", or any illusion thereof, which I assume helps with not anthropomorphizing it.
    - sanderjd 14d ago
      I use memory all the time so that I can ask it about things. That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do, it's just more convenient to search.
      - zephen 14d ago
        > That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do But are you happy handing over your notes documents to mass aggregators of information?
        sanderjd 14d ago
        In general, yes.
STRiDEX 14d ago
I absolutely hated talking to claude's opus and I suspect that's part of the problem here. Co-workers would tell me to try 4.6 or 4.8 instead of opus 5. They're all miserable. Sol and astra are the first models i've liked managing. Anthropic models feel as if they have some amount of distain for me and doing my work.
- jannyfer 14d ago
  I agree that the LLM behaviors between Anthropic and OpenAI are different enough now that it can lead to different experiences. I absolutely hate talking to Opus but don’t mind Sol and Astra. My guess is Martin used Opus.
jdw64 14d ago
LLMs produce a lot of wrong answers, but in fact people make just as many errors. I dislike LLM's grammar, but LLM writing has a higher information density than short pieces, so when it's not narrative writing, I trust LLM information. I dislike that an LLM can produce tens of thousands of lines in 30 minutes, but if I had done it, it would have taken a month. I know that using LLMs degrades my skills and also degrades my ability to verify LLMs. But in the freelance market, these days contracts are made on the premise that you use LLMs. I hate AI slop, but here I am actually trying to make a small indie game using AI. I hate LLMs, and I also like them. I have complicated feelings about it.
- queenkjuul 14d ago
  I don't think LLMs have high information density at all, a huge percentage of what they say reads like filler. They're essentially incapable of being concise. Which I think is partially evidenced by the "tens of thousands of lines" -- I'm working on a media streaming web app for fun on my own time and the whole project is yet to crack 10,000 lines (excluding libraries) including both the backend and the UI. When Claude shows me huge diff at work my first thought is "no way, there's got to be a cleaner simpler way to do this" and there always is
  - jdw64 14d ago
    I think it depends on the workflow. I believe I extract a fairly high information density. That said, this is ultimately a personalized experience, so I think there will be differences between people. Separately from that, I think it's also partly because I basically like writing densely myself. When I start a project, I always use error handling and templates, so I have a fixed form that comes to about 3,000 lines by default.
mindcandy 14d ago
> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice I find that what makes people hate LLM-voice isn’t the voice itself. It’s that the voice pings their brain with a reminder of their AI anxiety. That ping makes people instantly upset. > They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance … When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize... They are (software) machines I believe these ideas contradictory. I find that people get angry at LLMs bullshitting precisely because they are not anthropomorphizing. People bullshit all the time. But, these are machines! Machines are not supposed to bullshit! And, when they do, there’s supposed to be a bug filed and fixed. By holding LLMs up to the expectations of machines instead of expectations of (simulated) people, users are frustrating themselves. If you take the same “trust but verify (everything)” approach with LLMs as you do with people, you’ll be a lot less frustrated.
- mjlawson 14d ago
  I can't speak for others, but there's no anxiety in my dislike of "LLM-voice." The writing is terrible, overly dense, and often needlessly self-congratulatory or hedged. Many times it reads as if someone rewrote a perfectly good sentence with an unimportant preamble and adjectives pulled at random from a thesaurus which, I suppose, is kind of what happens.
- deleted 14d ago
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FLeXMurphy 14d ago
Since it is hugged, here is the text: ``` I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll get through it OK. But as I mull on this more, I realize that among this mix of contrasting feelings, there is one emotion that dominates - one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. That’s not enough to make me feel we should avoid them. As Jessica Kerr put it “not only are they useful, it is irresponsible not to use them…. They’re more thorough, as well as faster.” This contradictory reaction comes through in polling, where people say they find these models are useful, but also that they think they will be bad for society. Much of this may be because LLMs are young - we haven’t trained them to grow up yet. Maybe I’ll like them once they mature. (I hope we get to find out.) But I’m not encouraged when I think of the kinds of environments that cultivate them. I’m wary of the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture, and these LLMs are their products, so naturally lean toward their world-view. When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, treating them as conscious beings with their own will. They are (software) machines, developed by people working in corporations. While the agents’ behavior aren’t explicitly programmed, they are nurtured with the values of their creators. One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. I decline to interact with them socially, and make a deliberate effort to avoid working with them too, even if they are doing much that is beneficial. I feel that hanging out with pleasant, capable people, the people with integrity, has made my life a far better one. Hence my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from. ```
Retr0id 14d ago
I don't like LLMs in terms of "personality" either, and while I frequently find it annoying it's ultimately ok with me because they are not in fact people. Computers frequently do things that annoy me, but I use computers nonetheless.
cake-rusk 14d ago
I don't like Martin Fowler. He is the archetype of the architect astronaut. The OG bullshit meister. I like LLMs for stuff I don't care about. Programming is not one of them.
- nnevatie 14d ago
  Correct. The master BSer is afraid of being replaced by an even better BSer, so doesn’t like it.
- dave_sid 14d ago
  Didn’t he invent refactoring? Something that every developer in the world uses every day? Don’t think he’s a bullshitter.
  - cake-rusk 14d ago
    No he did not. For some reason people think he did. See following article where he talks about the inventors of refactoring: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/EtymologyOfRefactoring.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://martinfowler.com/bliki/EtymologyOfRefactoring.html?u...
    - dave_sid 14d ago
      What do you mean some reason? He wrote the book Refactoring that caused everyone to start refactoring. That’s quite a big reason. He literally wrote the book on it.
marcuskaz 14d ago
> I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons The attitude that AI is doing things all on its own is so pervasive. These are all set off by human operators, giving them instructions and tools to do whatever it is that are doing. The "AI has a mind of its own" attitude is just wrong. The fear of bad people using AI to do bad things is very different then AI agent swarms attacking and taking over.
- bunderbunder 14d ago
  I don't think he's implying that they'll start doing stuff like this of their own volition. Fowler's a smart guy, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he already knows that AI agents have human operators.
  - marcuskaz 14d ago
    I don't doubt that, but that's not what he wrote. It is also not how OpenAI or Anthropic position the attacks and escapes from their labs. The words matter, they are being positioned as intelligent and unable to be controlled which is just not true.
    - sodapopcan 14d ago
      I'm with you, and was also a bit surprised to see that coming from Fowler.
    - bunderbunder 14d ago
      Like you said, he wrote "agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure". 10 years ago, if someone had used similar wording to describe a computer virus "taking over" computers and adding them to a botnet, would you have read that as a literal implication that the virus independently made the decision to unleash itself? If not, then you can't confidently get that interpretation from Fowler's words alone, either. And we need to be cautious about projecting these kinds of assumptions onto people who take part in this discourse. People tut-tutting others about perceived instances of personifying AI has evolved into a form of collective well-poisoning whose main value, beyond scoring particularly cheap rhetorical points, is as a way to accuse AI critics of not understanding AI without actually accusing AI critics of not understanding AI, and to derail legitimate if opposing opinions into bickering about semantics.
causal 14d ago
I have noticed that my interactions with AI tend to raise stress more than lower it. Even when it's doing useful things for me. Have wondered if this is fundamental to the interaction, or a sign of user error, or something else.
- sunrunner 14d ago
  Perhaps from the overhead of the language interface coupled with the ease of the expansion of the amount of 'stuff' you potentially need to read and internalise? Human language can be wonderfully descriptive or terribly verbose as a way of communicating ideas. Writing everything out and being forced to externalise it is its own cost, which pays off only when the space of work to then do collapses with as little feedback as possible (and, ideally, with correct outcomes). On the other hand the ease with which you can simply get back more text to process means the upfront language heavy interface is now just returning back more information to pull back into your internal model. Which, for me at least, feels tiring, and stressful when doing language-heavy exploratory tasks that don't collapse or resolve neatly and simply give you back more decisions.
  - causal 14d ago
    I think you are right. My most pleasant interactions with LLMs are usually when it gives the perfect short response. Sometimes a single word.
glimshe 14d ago
Complaining about the "LLM voice" is a bit like complaining about the compiler error "voice". I configure my coding LLMs to get to the point and be succinct. It's a computer giving me information, so as long as the communication is clear and efficient, who cares about particular word choices?
- yusefnapora 14d ago
  It's hard to interact with a particular dialect day in and out without it eventually seeping into your habits of speech and thought. So the people most likely to care are your friends and family once they get bored of hearing about the "key insights" you've been having all day.
- osiejfiejf 14d ago
  I care about particular word choices when no matter what I do it won’t obey me and stop using them. I care about the “AI voice” only when I’m forced to deal with it when all I want is for Claude to stop spinning up long prose and referring to itself as a person just to maintain Anthropic’s “behave like a human” design with no way to make it fucking stop.
whiplash451 14d ago
As an engineer, I can relate but also found a workaround in deciding what kind of interactions I wanted to have with an LLM. As a coding agent? Yes. As an advisor for life decisions? No. And then there's a lot of in-between where I decide to use an LLM or not based on whether I will dislike the tone.
prometheus1992 14d ago
>>and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it I have been feeling this feeling but never put into words. Thanks martin.
- namrog84 14d ago
  Am I the odd one out. I dont call them out on such things. When a program error or fault. I dont feel the need to call it out. I move on. I just open new context and explain differently or provide more clarity. You won't ever "win" or convince a corrupted memory context when something goes wrong.i find it amusing, and move onto the next iteration.
  - doublerabbit 14d ago
    It's what I do too. I take what I've been given, write the comments of the code in the code, say good bye & thanks and then send it to the next context. New context with it's own code with my comments and a fresh pair of eyes can makes it shine.
GuB-42 14d ago
The difference between working with LLM you don't trust rather than with people you don't trust is that you have no social obligations with LLMs. If you want to work with untrustworthy people, you not only have to double check everything, which may be tolerable but you may also need to do some social gymnastics, as people usually don't like be told they are full of shit. LLMs don't mind, you can correct them, kill the conversation and open a new one with a clean context, even insult them if it makes you feel better with no negative consequences. In fact LLMs love to be corrected, and it is a common trap, as they will happily use your correction as fact and build around it, without pushing back even if you are wrong. So if there is a negative consequence to tell them they are wrong, that's it, LLMs won't hold a grudge against you like people do, but it may trigger more hallucinations.
reedlaw 14d ago
> we shouldn’t anthropomorphize Agreed, so why frame it as avoiding unpleasant people? My experience with Anthropic's latest models is that no amount of instruction can overcome their latent verbosity (nor can AGENTS.md overcome OpenAI models' reticence). I tried A/B testing several models and Opus was the clear winner, so I'm not likely to retire it just because it generates unpleasant prose. I do curate model-specific notes to mitigate some of the worst offenses.
- tstrimple 14d ago
  [flagged]
elim_garak 14d ago
> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice...They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. If you think the model is "bullshitting you" and is in need of being "called out", odds are that that tone is coming through in your prompts and the model's fake remorse is analogous to the fake remorse that you get after "calling out" a customer-support rep. In both cases, the entity at the other end of the connection is doing exactly what they are trained to do: placate you and deescalate. It's not bullshitting you, it's just wrong (or you're just wrong), and it usually can fix the problem if it's not too busy tending to your emotional state.
csunoad 14d ago
> I’m wary of the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture, and these LLMs are their products “Press X to doubt”
- deleted 14d ago
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deleted 14d ago
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misetech 14d ago
To be honest, as a software developer I never recommend handing over ur codebase completely to an autonomous AI agent. There are already instances of AI deleting whole databases. Most of the circuit breakers as of now use another AI to keep a check on your AI agent. That just makes the whole process slower and introduces more hallucination risks. Due to this reason, I built a tool called MiseGuard. MiSeGuard replaces slow, unpredictable "AI judges" with a deterministic, zero-AI circuit breaker. It is pure code, not an LLM. If a command attempts something catastrophic—like wiping a directory, deleting a database, or touching private secrets—it slams the door shut instantly with a hard stop before any damage can happen. Check it out here : https://github.com/midhunweb/miseguard https://github.com/midhunweb/miseguard
cuzezzzbbfofai 14d ago
Maybe he doesn't like the fact that LLMs are making his job obsolete.
- happytoexplain 14d ago
  These kinds of posts make the HN rule, "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article," very difficult to follow.
  - nchmy 14d ago
    its a fundamentally silly rule, because it is quite clear that people regularly comment without reading the article. Or, perhaps worse, read the article and didnt make the slightest effort to understand it.
- javanissen 14d ago
  Maybe he doesn't like them for the extremely clear reason he laid out in the article he wrote.
- archagon 14d ago
  I’d rather read a classic Fowler article than literally anything written by an LLM. Indeed, writing well about complex topics has become more important than ever. (But it’s not clear to me if Fowler has any remaining interest in doing it.)
nvarsj 14d ago
Insert "Old Man Yells At Cloud" meme
mahboi 14d ago
I don't get the feeling that LLMs act like the kind of people the author is complaining about. If anything they're like 2020 FAANG leadership, which pisses me off even more.
codeprimate 14d ago
LLM's are information processors. Linters on steroids. Don't talk to them? Maybe that's the issue..treating them like people instead of the text processors that they are. I use LLM's consistently every day and haven't had a "chat" with one in many months. Issue commands and request documents. The whole "thinking machine" role-play makes the tool dumber, not smarter, and corrupts your own patterns of thinking into ones that are dependent rather than imperative. Conversation is literally the least interesting and most error prone use case that LLM's can provide.
- kekdkejdjej 14d ago
  This is all down to these AI companies anyways. The simple fact that every single thing that comes out of these AI tools is processed and mangled to imitate human-like speech tells you everything you need to know about how deceitful these things are designed to be. I want Claude to stop referring to itself as “I”. I want it to reply with imperative sentences, free of personal pronouns. Give me what I ask for; do not pretend to be a human while doing it. But alas, no matter how many times I ask it to stop, it just won’t.
sakesun 14d ago
> we shouldn’t anthropomorphize Agree. We should start treating these statistical tools as tools, rather than pretending they are another kind of being.
lylo 14d ago
> They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human It’s entirely possible to configure an LLM to talk to you in a different voice of your choosing, eg. “when responding, use a professional, formal, business tone of voice”.
- threefour 14d ago
  Right. When I read this, I think it's a failure to embrace the tool, explore it, understand it, stress test it, and get creative with how to use it.
y_k19 14d ago
[flagged]

I Don't Like LLMs

223 points by TangerineDream 15d ago

titaniumrain 15d ago

[flagged]

caution 15d ago
winning

itanium 15d ago

Well llms are imperfect tools that provide a lot of value (they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words). They are here to stay.

verdverm 15d ago
> Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll get through it OK. > I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. I think what he needs is a personal fine-tune, something I suspect will become more prominent when we start getting multi-tenant LoRA and can use fine-tunes on a per-token cost basis. A co-worker commented that he thought the models performed worse after being "embarrassed," suspect it is an artifact of how some conversations progress in the training data.
- skeledrew 14d ago
  I've gotten better results both after "shouting at" and praising Claude, though the former causes more token burn because it starts questioning asking permission for everything after, which gets really annoying. Even a session clear doesn't get it completely back to baseline; only after some time does it return to "its old self".
  - verdverm 14d ago
    With opencode, I just start a new session and it's the same blank slate, there's no lingering of prior state Does /clear in claude not do what I intuit it to?
    - skeledrew 14d ago
      It does, but I feel like something is retained somewhere. There's already auto-memory, and the web chat has a persistent memory feature. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some hidden state that leads to per project or even per user auto-customization over time.
ashkankiani 15d ago
He says this in the post almost word-for-word. Are you agreeing with him? The opening "Well" confuses me on what tone you're going with.
happytoexplain 15d ago
This comment doesn't make sense as a response to anything the author said. As an aside: > they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words This is a confusing use of attribution. It's sort of like saying, "as Naval Ravikant famously said, AI can be very useful."
- itanium 14d ago
  [dead]
xdavidliu 15d ago
> offer leverage in form of agents i would expect that when you cite someone by name, the sentence being cited should at least be significant and meaningful to the slightest degree
dominotw 15d ago
you thought this was some sort of insightful rebuttal that you uniquely thought of?

atulatul 15d ago

Reminded me of someone saying that taste will become an important factor wrt AI tools/ things built with AI. Something like that. edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet: Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562 https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562

draw_down 15d ago

[dead]

artemonster 15d ago

Modern internet ruined forums and google search sucks hairy balls, and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. Its literally impossible to find anything meaningful on the internet nowadays. What else can we do besides asking an LLM these days?

mindcrime 15d ago
> and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. That was the case long before LLM's even existed though.
- harimau777 15d ago
  I think that the argument is not that it happened before LLMs. Rather, assuming I'm understanding the parent correctly, they are arguing that, due to the enshittification of search and the internet, LLMs are the only way to get information from it. That has definitely been my experience as well.
  - mindcrime 14d ago
    You may be correct.
miltonlost 15d ago
An LLM that is now serving ads! And also sucks up to you. And also is wrong confidently.
ashkankiani 15d ago
I agree in sentiment, and really a lot of this is Google's doing. It's been around a decade since they switched to approximate results and started encouraging people to search via sentences. I believe this is the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird The internet for all of its activity is becoming harder to index because the classic dumb search engines were turned into personalized semantic people pleasers. The classic model for knowledge discovery still exists, though. You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with. Go to a library, ask your coworkers. If you put in the ground-work, it's possible to do that. For seeds of knowledge outside of your local network, at this point you have to find the indexers that work for you. Personally, I am in the process of writing the infrastructure for my own search engine, and maybe I will share the tech broadly one day. For now, I'll keep my inventions to my closer personal circles. In general, I think people should be able to more easily maintain their own offline indices, and share knowledge graphs peer-to-peer rather than relying on a centralized one, in my opinion. This tech has no monetization opportunity, though, so I'm guessing that's why it's relatively under-developed, but luckily for me I have enough money and now enough time to develop and release it (and similar tools).

serf 15d ago

>One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.

hmokiguess 15d ago
Some people aren't very self aware of their own bubble and how luck plays a role in their life.
- bluGill 15d ago
  People who say that tend to make their own bad luck and not get nearly as far in life. Not that luck doesn't have a role, but everybody gets it.
- bcrosby95 15d ago
  Pointing to luck renders all advice meaningless.
  - esseph 15d ago
    Luck can mean opportunity, but doesn't reflect on capability, availability,or outcome.
  - jdiff 15d ago
    Much advice is meaningless, baseless post-mortem correlations from people trying to justify their own success.
    - rexpop 15d ago
      "Buy more lottery tickets!"
      - teravor 15d ago
        no, it's "buy lottery tickets to exclusive lotteries". the ability to enter such lotteries is where success lies. either through connections or ability.

tonymet 15d ago

> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like. > They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you means you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.

zamalek 15d ago
> This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like. This doesn't work by, effectively, Anthropic's own admission. CC's concise mode tells Claude to wind its neck in every turn. That is significantly more than changing the prompt.
- tonymet 15d ago
  That’s a specific example that doesn’t have anything to do with the general approach of prompting.
sgarland 15d ago
I’m simply exhausted at needing to refute incorrect LLM answers professionally.
- tonymet 15d ago
  Even AI would have provided a more insightful response than this.
aarjaneiro 15d ago
Yeah but what about when you have to read code by others who didn't care for this? At this point, code comments have lost all meaning

deburo 15d ago

What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both? Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?

ModernMech 15d ago
Brogrammers are in it for the love of money. Programmers are in it for the love of programming.
- hectdev 15d ago
  what if you're in it for both? I like solving puzzles and want to extract the maximum amount I am due for making a company profits.
  - rexpop 15d ago
    Good, then you're not a scab!
- Legend2440 15d ago
  I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it. For most people it's a job, and that's ok.
  - nicoburns 15d ago
    > I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.
    - Legend2440 15d ago
      Maybe? Dev job at a non-tech F500 company. All these guys have kids and houses in the suburbs.

moomoo11 15d ago

maybe use the LLM to help you keep your site working under load? it is a tool after all.

majkinetor 15d ago
Indeed. Very disappointing given what figure is in question. Simple GH pages behind CF would do which is something people starting learning IT this week can do.
- dprkh 15d ago
  > Very disappointing given what figure is in question. Are you implying that Martin Fowler is a highly respected figure or something? He just comes off as a grifter from what I can see.
  - majkinetor 14d ago
    In development world, yes he is (agile, patterns etc.). Not a grifter, how did you get that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler_(software_engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler_(software_engine...
    - dprkh 14d ago
      From my experience, professional content creators tend to either have little idea of the actual topic they create content on, or their knowledge is very outdated. For example, one might have been a software engineer previously, but at some point they pivoted towards being a writer, and over the years their software engineering skills became atrophied and outdated. Martin Fowler in particular appears to have only worked for two companies, PwC and "Thoughtworks," both obscure outstaffing/consulting firms, and yet he claims to be "a leading authority on agile, refactoring, architecture, and software design." I am not convinced he has the credibility to call himself that, or claim to be some kind of expert in software engineering. Would be happy to be proven wrong.

droidjj 15d ago

In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.* *This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.

ux266478 14d ago
A major difference is they weren't being sold as "assistants" back then. Now they're a product expected to act a certain way. While some LLMisms probably come from shared poison in the pretraining corpus, many of them also come about as a result of trying to make them more appealing as a product. Most open weight models are just a company's product, post-instruct and everything. Base models are a different ballgame (and are becoming increasingly sparse), so effectively no matter what you're pulling in someone's model that's been trained into the chirpy "executive assistant" personality we all hate. Some models are worse for it than others. You can tell the post-training makes all the difference though. Gemini has a different stink to it than DeepSeek.
throw-the-towel 14d ago
I miss you, Secret Horses.

Invictus0 15d ago

[flagged]

heavensteeth 15d ago

hugged. https://archive.is/LahHs https://archive.is/LahHs

z0r 15d ago
archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?
- Barbing 14d ago
  Blocking / infinite CAPTCHA loops seem to revolve. Sometimes Cloudflare DNS they don’t like. Can be country blocks too. Right now it’s top notch here. Would say more but don’t want to give bots an abusable profile :)
- undecidabot 14d ago
  Are you using Cloudflare's DNS (1.1.1.1)? If so, it won't resolve[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- Ampersander 14d ago
  One thing about that site is that it is owned by a Russian and Finnish IPs are blocked from accessing it. Here's some context https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-... Edit: I did a web search and it seems to go even further back. There are discussions online about archive.is blocking Finland already 10 years ago. But the block was definitely off between then when it was put back on earlier this year.

acedTrex 15d ago

yes they are incredibly unpleasant to work with. Like the most annoying coworker you ever had. For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.

simonw_simonw_ 15d ago
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deleted 15d ago

[deleted]

techblueberry 15d ago

One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained. I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias." And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience. Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean. I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society. I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.

huurtehoog 15d ago
I have great success in specifically asking LLM tools for academic literature after describing the problem or field I would like to get some insight into. It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers. They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers. It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now. But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
- 15d ago

Omicron18 15d ago

https://archive.ph/LahHs https://archive.ph/LahHs

saadn92 15d ago

LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.

ozlikethewizard 15d ago
What were you paying for?
- ilikehurdles 15d ago
  Turbotax.
  - qarl 14d ago
    Yep. I have crazy tax. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself. Also - lowkey legal documents.
  - edoceo 15d ago
    I've had these AI things also help out with my US taxes. Has held up to review as well.
  - saadn92 14d ago
    yes! I've had it even help me with looking and buying homes. I ended up catching things in a contract that would have screwed me over. there's so many use cases outside of software
- saadn92 15d ago
  Youtube music, GitKraken, 1password, Parallels -- i've canceled subscriptions to all of these because either I've replaced them or have had help from LLMs enough to find different options that are either free or cheaper.
  - bthrn 15d ago
    For use cases like this, how is the LLM different from a Google search?

phendrenad2 15d ago

I don't like hammers, either. But I wouldn't try to build a house without one, now that they've been invented.

card_zero 14d ago
Do you really not like hammers? They seem quite nice. Hefty, tactile, purposeful.
- phendrenad2 14d ago
  No, I think hammers are fine. I think I could find a lot wrong with them if I tried, though. I could miss the nail and mash my fingers. I could misplace them and not have one ready when I need to build something. The hammer might be too heavy and might bend a small nail, or might be too light and not be able to bang in a large nail. I was making a point that AI agents are just a tool, and "liking" them is kind of irrelevant. I'll take my downvotes like a trooper, go ahead.
  - happytoexplain 14d ago
    Analogies are usually weak. They are rhetorical candy. Just defend LLMs on their own merits - don't bother simply stating that they are like a hammer, or a car, or a compiler. And try to resist the urge to predict your own downvotes. You are not a brave, pitiable underdog. You're just a person with an opinion, like all of us.
    - card_zero 13d ago
      I wish to defend the hammers analogy. I don't know, our whole world is analogies, isn't it? Plus it's funny, that's worth something right?
      - happytoexplain 13d ago
        True, analogies are great fun, and useful for teaching. They're just rarely useful for convincing. It's hard to make a meaningful attack or defense of something, A, by pointing to a different thing, B, without some serious case-building.

hybrid_study 15d ago

Reasonable stance, though not sure it will remain viable.

seaucre 15d ago

I think this is a very even-handed, reasonable position. and it's true - LLMs can be unpleasant to talk to. the day it feels like a magical delightful experience is the day we'll probably be out of jobs, though.

doublerabbit 14d ago
Polite and unionised LLMs quietly mocking the human existence. "Would you like some tea' with your unemployment, sir?"

llm_nerd 15d ago

While the article is fairly broad (it talks about "our profession", which ostensibly is coding, but then talks more about LLMs and their conversational style which is something that everyone has opinions on), it's worth pondering what his professional relationship with coding is today. Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority? Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.

queenkjuul 14d ago
Meh, i use LLMs every day as a 9-5 dev and i absolutely despise how they write, and i don't particularly like how they write code. Sometimes I'd rather just have something done, and asking an LLM is basically always faster than using Google now.

mmooss 15d ago

> Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.

simonw_simonw_ 15d ago

[dead]

AIiscoming 15d ago

It surprises me a little bit that we still don't have a personalized agent. I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company. It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.

binlog 15d ago

Kinda funny that one of the biggest software engineering “influencers” of all time can’t host a blog that survives HN front page traffic. Maybe try LLMs Martin. He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.

tjwebbnorfolk 14d ago
I for one am excited to move past the whatever-martin-fowler-thinks era of infrastructure "best practices". Many of his ideas are trendy nonsense that have caused more harm than good. Ask anyone managing 150 enmeshed and intertwined microservices that could have run on a single computer
- tripleee 14d ago
  I don't think he should hold responsibility for people misunderstanding and misapplying his ideas
tomgp 14d ago
The post has nothing to do with writing software. It would have as much value if it were written by someone who'd never written a line of code in their life. It's about the social dimension of LLMs and how the personality they present is, for some of us, pretty grating. Martin is a good writer and (from what I've heard from those who've spent time with him) a lovely person which I think makes him well qualified to speak on the topic.
- sanderjd 14d ago
  But ... there is no "social dimension of LLMs" for me, they are just tools.
  - tomgp 14d ago
    I agree, they are just tools, but the way they are presented; taking natural language as their input and responding in kind strongly influences the way our brains react to them on a social level. That's what I mean by their social dimension.

SillyUsername 15d ago

Love the totally conflicting statements in that post. - When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize - ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from. So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example). Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D

sanderjd 14d ago
Sometimes I wonder if this is a personality thing. It has never occurred to me to anthropomorphize these things. But it seems like a huge number of people struggle with this.
- Retr0id 14d ago
  I suspect harness and usage modality is a big factor. Personally I disable all "memory" features wherever possible. I don't want the LLM to "get to know me", or any illusion thereof, which I assume helps with not anthropomorphizing it.
  - sanderjd 14d ago
    I use memory all the time so that I can ask it about things. That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do, it's just more convenient to search.
    - zephen 14d ago
      > That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do But are you happy handing over your notes documents to mass aggregators of information?
      - sanderjd 14d ago
        In general, yes.

STRiDEX 14d ago

I absolutely hated talking to claude's opus and I suspect that's part of the problem here. Co-workers would tell me to try 4.6 or 4.8 instead of opus 5. They're all miserable. Sol and astra are the first models i've liked managing. Anthropic models feel as if they have some amount of distain for me and doing my work.

jannyfer 14d ago
I agree that the LLM behaviors between Anthropic and OpenAI are different enough now that it can lead to different experiences. I absolutely hate talking to Opus but don’t mind Sol and Astra. My guess is Martin used Opus.

jdw64 14d ago

LLMs produce a lot of wrong answers, but in fact people make just as many errors. I dislike LLM's grammar, but LLM writing has a higher information density than short pieces, so when it's not narrative writing, I trust LLM information. I dislike that an LLM can produce tens of thousands of lines in 30 minutes, but if I had done it, it would have taken a month. I know that using LLMs degrades my skills and also degrades my ability to verify LLMs. But in the freelance market, these days contracts are made on the premise that you use LLMs. I hate AI slop, but here I am actually trying to make a small indie game using AI. I hate LLMs, and I also like them. I have complicated feelings about it.

queenkjuul 14d ago
I don't think LLMs have high information density at all, a huge percentage of what they say reads like filler. They're essentially incapable of being concise. Which I think is partially evidenced by the "tens of thousands of lines" -- I'm working on a media streaming web app for fun on my own time and the whole project is yet to crack 10,000 lines (excluding libraries) including both the backend and the UI. When Claude shows me huge diff at work my first thought is "no way, there's got to be a cleaner simpler way to do this" and there always is
- jdw64 14d ago
  I think it depends on the workflow. I believe I extract a fairly high information density. That said, this is ultimately a personalized experience, so I think there will be differences between people. Separately from that, I think it's also partly because I basically like writing densely myself. When I start a project, I always use error handling and templates, so I have a fixed form that comes to about 3,000 lines by default.

mindcandy 14d ago

> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice I find that what makes people hate LLM-voice isn’t the voice itself. It’s that the voice pings their brain with a reminder of their AI anxiety. That ping makes people instantly upset. > They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance … When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize... They are (software) machines I believe these ideas contradictory. I find that people get angry at LLMs bullshitting precisely because they are not anthropomorphizing. People bullshit all the time. But, these are machines! Machines are not supposed to bullshit! And, when they do, there’s supposed to be a bug filed and fixed. By holding LLMs up to the expectations of machines instead of expectations of (simulated) people, users are frustrating themselves. If you take the same “trust but verify (everything)” approach with LLMs as you do with people, you’ll be a lot less frustrated.

mjlawson 14d ago
I can't speak for others, but there's no anxiety in my dislike of "LLM-voice." The writing is terrible, overly dense, and often needlessly self-congratulatory or hedged. Many times it reads as if someone rewrote a perfectly good sentence with an unimportant preamble and adjectives pulled at random from a thesaurus which, I suppose, is kind of what happens.
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FLeXMurphy 14d ago

Since it is hugged, here is the text: ``` I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll get through it OK. But as I mull on this more, I realize that among this mix of contrasting feelings, there is one emotion that dominates - one that comes from my direct interactions with LLMs. I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. That’s not enough to make me feel we should avoid them. As Jessica Kerr put it “not only are they useful, it is irresponsible not to use them…. They’re more thorough, as well as faster.” This contradictory reaction comes through in polling, where people say they find these models are useful, but also that they think they will be bad for society. Much of this may be because LLMs are young - we haven’t trained them to grow up yet. Maybe I’ll like them once they mature. (I hope we get to find out.) But I’m not encouraged when I think of the kinds of environments that cultivate them. I’m wary of the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture, and these LLMs are their products, so naturally lean toward their world-view. When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, treating them as conscious beings with their own will. They are (software) machines, developed by people working in corporations. While the agents’ behavior aren’t explicitly programmed, they are nurtured with the values of their creators. One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. I decline to interact with them socially, and make a deliberate effort to avoid working with them too, even if they are doing much that is beneficial. I feel that hanging out with pleasant, capable people, the people with integrity, has made my life a far better one. Hence my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from. ```

Retr0id 14d ago

I don't like LLMs in terms of "personality" either, and while I frequently find it annoying it's ultimately ok with me because they are not in fact people. Computers frequently do things that annoy me, but I use computers nonetheless.

cake-rusk 14d ago

I don't like Martin Fowler. He is the archetype of the architect astronaut. The OG bullshit meister. I like LLMs for stuff I don't care about. Programming is not one of them.

nnevatie 14d ago
Correct. The master BSer is afraid of being replaced by an even better BSer, so doesn’t like it.
dave_sid 14d ago
Didn’t he invent refactoring? Something that every developer in the world uses every day? Don’t think he’s a bullshitter.
- cake-rusk 14d ago
  No he did not. For some reason people think he did. See following article where he talks about the inventors of refactoring: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/EtymologyOfRefactoring.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://martinfowler.com/bliki/EtymologyOfRefactoring.html?u...
  - dave_sid 14d ago
    What do you mean some reason? He wrote the book Refactoring that caused everyone to start refactoring. That’s quite a big reason. He literally wrote the book on it.

marcuskaz 14d ago

> I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons The attitude that AI is doing things all on its own is so pervasive. These are all set off by human operators, giving them instructions and tools to do whatever it is that are doing. The "AI has a mind of its own" attitude is just wrong. The fear of bad people using AI to do bad things is very different then AI agent swarms attacking and taking over.

bunderbunder 14d ago
I don't think he's implying that they'll start doing stuff like this of their own volition. Fowler's a smart guy, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he already knows that AI agents have human operators.
- marcuskaz 14d ago
  I don't doubt that, but that's not what he wrote. It is also not how OpenAI or Anthropic position the attacks and escapes from their labs. The words matter, they are being positioned as intelligent and unable to be controlled which is just not true.
  - sodapopcan 14d ago
    I'm with you, and was also a bit surprised to see that coming from Fowler.
  - bunderbunder 14d ago
    Like you said, he wrote "agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure". 10 years ago, if someone had used similar wording to describe a computer virus "taking over" computers and adding them to a botnet, would you have read that as a literal implication that the virus independently made the decision to unleash itself? If not, then you can't confidently get that interpretation from Fowler's words alone, either. And we need to be cautious about projecting these kinds of assumptions onto people who take part in this discourse. People tut-tutting others about perceived instances of personifying AI has evolved into a form of collective well-poisoning whose main value, beyond scoring particularly cheap rhetorical points, is as a way to accuse AI critics of not understanding AI without actually accusing AI critics of not understanding AI, and to derail legitimate if opposing opinions into bickering about semantics.

causal 14d ago

I have noticed that my interactions with AI tend to raise stress more than lower it. Even when it's doing useful things for me. Have wondered if this is fundamental to the interaction, or a sign of user error, or something else.

sunrunner 14d ago
Perhaps from the overhead of the language interface coupled with the ease of the expansion of the amount of 'stuff' you potentially need to read and internalise? Human language can be wonderfully descriptive or terribly verbose as a way of communicating ideas. Writing everything out and being forced to externalise it is its own cost, which pays off only when the space of work to then do collapses with as little feedback as possible (and, ideally, with correct outcomes). On the other hand the ease with which you can simply get back more text to process means the upfront language heavy interface is now just returning back more information to pull back into your internal model. Which, for me at least, feels tiring, and stressful when doing language-heavy exploratory tasks that don't collapse or resolve neatly and simply give you back more decisions.
- causal 14d ago
  I think you are right. My most pleasant interactions with LLMs are usually when it gives the perfect short response. Sometimes a single word.

glimshe 14d ago

Complaining about the "LLM voice" is a bit like complaining about the compiler error "voice". I configure my coding LLMs to get to the point and be succinct. It's a computer giving me information, so as long as the communication is clear and efficient, who cares about particular word choices?

yusefnapora 14d ago
It's hard to interact with a particular dialect day in and out without it eventually seeping into your habits of speech and thought. So the people most likely to care are your friends and family once they get bored of hearing about the "key insights" you've been having all day.
osiejfiejf 14d ago
I care about particular word choices when no matter what I do it won’t obey me and stop using them. I care about the “AI voice” only when I’m forced to deal with it when all I want is for Claude to stop spinning up long prose and referring to itself as a person just to maintain Anthropic’s “behave like a human” design with no way to make it fucking stop.

whiplash451 14d ago

As an engineer, I can relate but also found a workaround in deciding what kind of interactions I wanted to have with an LLM. As a coding agent? Yes. As an advisor for life decisions? No. And then there's a lot of in-between where I decide to use an LLM or not based on whether I will dislike the tone.

prometheus1992 14d ago

>>and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it I have been feeling this feeling but never put into words. Thanks martin.

namrog84 14d ago
Am I the odd one out. I dont call them out on such things. When a program error or fault. I dont feel the need to call it out. I move on. I just open new context and explain differently or provide more clarity. You won't ever "win" or convince a corrupted memory context when something goes wrong.i find it amusing, and move onto the next iteration.
- doublerabbit 14d ago
  It's what I do too. I take what I've been given, write the comments of the code in the code, say good bye & thanks and then send it to the next context. New context with it's own code with my comments and a fresh pair of eyes can makes it shine.

GuB-42 14d ago

The difference between working with LLM you don't trust rather than with people you don't trust is that you have no social obligations with LLMs. If you want to work with untrustworthy people, you not only have to double check everything, which may be tolerable but you may also need to do some social gymnastics, as people usually don't like be told they are full of shit. LLMs don't mind, you can correct them, kill the conversation and open a new one with a clean context, even insult them if it makes you feel better with no negative consequences. In fact LLMs love to be corrected, and it is a common trap, as they will happily use your correction as fact and build around it, without pushing back even if you are wrong. So if there is a negative consequence to tell them they are wrong, that's it, LLMs won't hold a grudge against you like people do, but it may trigger more hallucinations.

reedlaw 14d ago

> we shouldn’t anthropomorphize Agreed, so why frame it as avoiding unpleasant people? My experience with Anthropic's latest models is that no amount of instruction can overcome their latent verbosity (nor can AGENTS.md overcome OpenAI models' reticence). I tried A/B testing several models and Opus was the clear winner, so I'm not likely to retire it just because it generates unpleasant prose. I do curate model-specific notes to mitigate some of the worst offenses.

tstrimple 14d ago
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elim_garak 14d ago

> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice...They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it. If you think the model is "bullshitting you" and is in need of being "called out", odds are that that tone is coming through in your prompts and the model's fake remorse is analogous to the fake remorse that you get after "calling out" a customer-support rep. In both cases, the entity at the other end of the connection is doing exactly what they are trained to do: placate you and deescalate. It's not bullshitting you, it's just wrong (or you're just wrong), and it usually can fix the problem if it's not too busy tending to your emotional state.

csunoad 14d ago

> I’m wary of the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture, and these LLMs are their products “Press X to doubt”

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misetech 14d ago

To be honest, as a software developer I never recommend handing over ur codebase completely to an autonomous AI agent. There are already instances of AI deleting whole databases. Most of the circuit breakers as of now use another AI to keep a check on your AI agent. That just makes the whole process slower and introduces more hallucination risks. Due to this reason, I built a tool called MiseGuard. MiSeGuard replaces slow, unpredictable "AI judges" with a deterministic, zero-AI circuit breaker. It is pure code, not an LLM. If a command attempts something catastrophic—like wiping a directory, deleting a database, or touching private secrets—it slams the door shut instantly with a hard stop before any damage can happen. Check it out here : https://github.com/midhunweb/miseguard https://github.com/midhunweb/miseguard

cuzezzzbbfofai 14d ago

Maybe he doesn't like the fact that LLMs are making his job obsolete.

happytoexplain 14d ago
These kinds of posts make the HN rule, "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article," very difficult to follow.
- nchmy 14d ago
  its a fundamentally silly rule, because it is quite clear that people regularly comment without reading the article. Or, perhaps worse, read the article and didnt make the slightest effort to understand it.
javanissen 14d ago
Maybe he doesn't like them for the extremely clear reason he laid out in the article he wrote.
archagon 14d ago
I’d rather read a classic Fowler article than literally anything written by an LLM. Indeed, writing well about complex topics has become more important than ever. (But it’s not clear to me if Fowler has any remaining interest in doing it.)

nvarsj 14d ago

Insert "Old Man Yells At Cloud" meme

mahboi 14d ago

I don't get the feeling that LLMs act like the kind of people the author is complaining about. If anything they're like 2020 FAANG leadership, which pisses me off even more.

codeprimate 14d ago

LLM's are information processors. Linters on steroids. Don't talk to them? Maybe that's the issue..treating them like people instead of the text processors that they are. I use LLM's consistently every day and haven't had a "chat" with one in many months. Issue commands and request documents. The whole "thinking machine" role-play makes the tool dumber, not smarter, and corrupts your own patterns of thinking into ones that are dependent rather than imperative. Conversation is literally the least interesting and most error prone use case that LLM's can provide.

kekdkejdjej 14d ago
This is all down to these AI companies anyways. The simple fact that every single thing that comes out of these AI tools is processed and mangled to imitate human-like speech tells you everything you need to know about how deceitful these things are designed to be. I want Claude to stop referring to itself as “I”. I want it to reply with imperative sentences, free of personal pronouns. Give me what I ask for; do not pretend to be a human while doing it. But alas, no matter how many times I ask it to stop, it just won’t.

sakesun 14d ago

> we shouldn’t anthropomorphize Agree. We should start treating these statistical tools as tools, rather than pretending they are another kind of being.

lylo 14d ago

> They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human It’s entirely possible to configure an LLM to talk to you in a different voice of your choosing, eg. “when responding, use a professional, formal, business tone of voice”.

threefour 14d ago
Right. When I read this, I think it's a failure to embrace the tool, explore it, understand it, stress test it, and get creative with how to use it.

y_k19 14d ago

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