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The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

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

#51

Post by jmartrican »

jmartrican wrote: post #49
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 revi…

I think that the onus is on us to get better at using agents and AI to solve the pain points and speed things up while keeping quality high and our mental tools sharpened. I do nto think turning back is an option, but managing the pain points and leveling up is.

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

#52

Post by fny »

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.

We will suffer from not knowing how to add. You could still argue "so what?"

Systems aren't a single addition. They are compounded operations with sprawling complexity. What happens when you can't reason through the system? What happens when you start asking for the wrong things? What happens when saying "fix it" on loop stops working?

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

#54

Post by throw10920 »

skinfaxi wrote: post #46
throw10920 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we have things like software architecture patterns that can be discussed at a high level without knowing the intricacies

I think the counterargument would be "you can't teach people architecture alone and get good architects".

I've observed this myself in "systems engineers" whose job is to connect boxes together without understanding how the boxes work. They, invariably, design ridiculous architectures on their own and need to basically find a domain expert to route their opinions through to come up with anything sane.

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

#55

Post by pydry »

Diogenesian wrote: post #47
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…

The productivity depends upon the requirements.

If slop is fine (and sometimes it is), the benefits are undeniable. If the dev was the kind that would have produced slop anyway - again, undeniable boost.

If the quality needs to be high I think it actually can slow you down, though.

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

#56

Post by customguy »

skinfaxi wrote: post #25
dominotw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For sure. You cannot have "only higher level thoughts" without doing lower level work. Ironically llm themselves prove that because you cannot remove facts like 'paris is capital of france' from llm and have it just retain 'high level thoughts' like 'countries have cap…

> 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?

How many people struggle with their computer, or get scammed, because to them it's just icons on a screen, with not even the concept of a process, memory vs. disk, or anything? How much money is lost each year because someone doesn't know what an URL is?

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

#57

Post by grayhatter »

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…

> Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed. [Excluding people who don’t want anything to do with LLMs out of moral principle, which curiously just like the overarching topic I also both respect and understand, but on the other hand don’t do myself.]

Setting aside my moral outrage over the magic token machines. What about me, who gets so tripped up over minor factual errors, that I'm unable to let them go, and it taints the whole conversation such that I'm too wrapped up in my frustration that I can't think about it clearly? Or my innate drive for correctness that's so strong that I eval the minor errors in output, as catastrophically incompatible with my goals?

> Stoically continuing to sharpen your skills on your own, but risking being left in the dust productivity-wise?

I don't believe there's a meaningful productivity increase. Please cite your published (not preprint) peer-reviewed research that proves the productivity improvement. Until then, I'm unconvinced. (Believe me I'd like to be convinced of reality, the answer is still unresolved, and I have my opinions, but I'd rather something conclusive that I can have confidence in)

Then, even if you did show a significant productivity improvement, it wouldn't help me. I have too many qualms over the output quality that I simple can not let go, (I don't think I should, but everyone keeps trying to convince me to lower my quality standards). I don't want something fast, I have plenty of really "fast" things in my life. I exclusively want to add things that are high quality to my life. Things that don't endlessly frustrate me.

The question about where the middle ground is a rhetorically dishonest question. You'd first have to prove/convince me, that there IS a middle ground. Instead of what I believe where that middle ground belongs is quality, and everything emitted by an LLM moves reality in the wrong direction.

Are any of these absolutes? nah, hence my request/demand for peer-review research. All the productivity claims and quality assertions (mine included) are still *exclusively* vibes. But exactly none of them are pristine, (especially not any of the LLM output.)

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

#58

Post by voidUpdate »

> "Last but not least, even when just researching with LLMs, they have the natural tendency to silently sneak in the thoughts of the majority of the training materials, or sometimes even the political convictions of the ones who created the model."

> "Yet I still write all of my texts with LLMs"

So I'm guessing the author is actually ok with the point they put in the "LLMs are bad" part of the article?

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

#59

Post by jmartrican »

xnorswap wrote: post #31
Levitz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed. My largest concern comes from something tangential to this: I'm not sure we're all that good at deciding what should be learned and sticking to it. Silly…

I've been using regex decades, but it never really stuck to do anything too complex, it was the perfect intersection of difficult and infrequent. ( And also variable - PCRE vs others customisations / non-regular parts, etc ). I am very glad that I can now just ask claude for a regex to achieve my intent. Does it mean I'll never master regex? Yes it does, but decades has shown that was unlikely to ever happen anyway.

Regex came up so infrequent that I found myself referring to documentation whenever I needed to use it. But I always wondered, what are the jobs or roles that use it so often that they have mastered it.

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

#60

Post by adamas »

voidUpdate wrote: post #58

> "Last but not least, even when just researching with LLMs, they have the natural tendency to silently sneak in the thoughts of the majority of the training materials, or sometimes even the political convictions of the ones who created the model." > "Yet I still write all of my texts with LLMs" So I'm guessing the author is actually ok with the point they put in the "LLMs are bad" part of the article?

That's the problem with human written text, sometimes it hallucinates.
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