The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway • Hacker News Board

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#41

Post by qsera » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

>Can we really be sure that thoughts, opinions, taste will still come out sharper and faster after five, ten, 20 years of using these tools almost every day?

After 5 years, I think the thought profile every power user of the LLMs would be an LLM derived carbon copy of each other.

Prepare the world to get even more boringly uniform

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#42

Post by lnfromx » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #20

> I think the core issue here is trust. You should never trust random people on the internet anyway. But before LLMs, there was this base thing: creating a proper PR with proper descriptions would require at least some human time, so it would keep trolls and low quality submissions out. Or at least you could easily filter them out within a couple of seconds. So even if a new person came in, you could trust that this…

> There is barely anything more rewarding than teaching someone something, to watch the other person grow

I think many junior devs (or aspiring junior devs) look for exactly this experience. This is a matching problem we haven't solved yet. Is Open Source the solution ? I really think it has to be solved if we want truely reliable software in the future.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#43

Post by TonyAlicea10 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

prettyblocks wrote: post #37

msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

> I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. It will, but I'm not sure the impact of this will be all too great. We suffer from not knowing how to use an abacus because we have a calculator, and people who feel a pull to keep their low-level chops up will do so anyway.

I don't think this is equivalent. The calculator won't occasionally hallucinate a wrong answer. LLMs are a far leakier abstraction which means skill atrophy impacts evaluation and verification ability.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#44

Post by greggoB » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #5

The implication is that LLM critics don't use LLMs at all, or that the author is not an LLM critic, but both of those things are incorrect. We are very good at inventing entire people out of single opinions we read, and the AI arguments are maybe the best example of that I've ever seen in my many years watching internet arguments (not least due to the expansiveness of AI, and the sheer breadth of pros and cons it hol…

> We are very good at inventing entire people out of single opinions we read

Can you clarify what this is supposed to mean?

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#45

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

Putting all this in 2nd paragraph so that you can skip it if you think 'coding' is your primary portion of your job.

I suppose I am in a mildly privileged position in a sense that my work is a weird intersection of tech, finance, and comprehension. In other words, I don't code much, but I absolutely benefit from now being able to play with various projects I would otherwise have no business touching without a bigger support team.

I don't want to invoke Accelenrando, but the muscle imagery and analogy fits. I will give an example. I recently decided to pick up Go for a project ( have experience in some other languages, but I will still be starting fresh ). I could have codex build me what I want, but I am purposefully taking it slow so that I can learn the foundation so that I can have a frame of reference ( because I assume it won't be the only go project for me ).

Otoh, most of my one off python scripts I barely even skim anymore. And honestly,that is the part that scares me more.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#46

Post by skinfaxi » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

throw10920 wrote: post #33

skinfaxi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For sure. You cannot have "only higher level thoughts" without doing lower level work What do you mean? I think people routinely think about things at a very high level with almost no understanding of the lower levels. How many people use a computer each day and reason about them at a very high level while knowing nothing of capacitors, logic gates, or programming languages?

I think they didn't phrase it precisely, but my guess is the underlying idea is actually "high-level software architecture doesn't have a clear abstraction layer you can use to separate it from low-level coding (unlike logic gates, the CPU's ISA, the kernel API, etc), and so delegating the latter leads to delegating the former".

That makes sense but I'm still not so sure—we have things like software architecture patterns that can be discussed at a high level without knowing the intricacies. Like you can be aware of load balancing and even use it but be unaware of how load balancing might work algorithmically.

Let's consider even the original example. > You cannot remove facts like 'paris is capital of france' from llm and have it just retain 'high level thoughts' like 'countries have capitals that you can look up'

Wouldn't the knowledge that countries have capitals precede the knowledge that Paris is the capital of France?

This says nothing about the accuracy of our own models based on these abstractions that lack the lower-level understanding.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#47

Post by Diogenesian » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

I will just point out the benefit is not as obvious as you think. Developers have consistently overestimated LLM productivity gains, which still seems true for agentic AI: https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-11-ai-usage-survey/ It is particularly striking how similar the results are to LLMs before agents.

Along with the total absence of long-term data, I think the benefit can be (weakly) denied. Maybe not in the employmemt marketplace, but certainly for myself.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#48

Post by matsemann » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

My use of AI is correct. My coworkers use is not.

I'm saying it in jest, but it's also a bit true. Not necessarily because we use it any differently. But because my use of AI saves me time. But their use of AI adds more to my plate, no matter if it's slop or not.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#49

Post by jmartrican » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

> So what’s the ideal “middle ground” in this situation?

I use agents to code. But I remember the early days of just AI smart complete in the IDE, where as the programmer I had to be more involved with designing and implementating the solution. This kept me engaged with the implementation as it was being built out. Now with agents, I find myself trying to catch up with what the agent did and spend more time code reviewing. Maybe you end up in the same place in the end. But building the implementation, vs code reviewing, feels more rewarding and I think helps keep your mental tool sharpened.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#50

Post by threethirtytwo » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

You're all in denial when you criticize LLMs. It's not necessarily that the criticism isn't true. It's more how self assured the criticism is. That's the biggest problem because AI is a moving target. It is getting better, and it is getting better fast. A lot of the criticism can become outdated in a year or six months. The change is happening in front of your very eyes and yet you can always reliably come on HN and find some sort of self assured criticism to say AI can't design, AI code must always be reviewed. Blah blah blah.

The big thing people used to call AI was that it was a stochastic parrot and all it did was summarize things. Clearly. None of this is/was true anymore. And very likely all the current criticism will be eliminated soon and we have to find new excuses about AI that makes us feel we are superior.

The status quo is about to change. Every 6 months. And you will always think of yourself as superior to LLMs. Your current criticisms will evolve as most of them will be rendered not true pretty soon.