I think that the use of LLMs to expedite the learning process (especially when it comes to learning new things) is extraordinary and should be practiced by anybody with the means to. Think about how far we as the human race have come. Everything eventually plateaus and either flatlines or else regresses.. With the use of AI we can expand our ways of thinking into a new tier we would have never been able to achieve otherwise. It goes without saying that people who refuse to use the tools we've been given are close-minded and susceptible to fail in the new age that we are truly lucky to be a part of. And its here to stay, whether you like it or not lol
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
251–260 of 330 posts
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#252> 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 think you can use them critically. Probe the code, see how it behaves when tweaked, can you break it etc.? without slowing you down too much. And in doing so you probably learn 80% of what you would have if you'd written it yourself by hand.
But then there are definitely cases where LLMs are slower and less reliable than someone using tooling by hand, especially like deterministic refactoring operations can be done close to instantly if you already know what needs to be done and how to do it.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I will just point out the benefit is not as obvious as you think. Developers have consistently overestimated LLM I think there are two different claims here: - developers overestimate productivity gains, which is a solid finding in many of these studies. Skepticism of extremely large productivity gains is warranted and I flatly disbelieve "10x uplift" claims. - LLMs give no productivity uplift at all, which is much…
Maybe we can make an analogy with taking the plane vs driving to your destination.
A plane literally goes 10x faster than a car, so a 5 hour drive becomes a 30 minutes flight. But if you have to drive to the airport, arrive early, pass check-in, security, boarding, then pick up your luggage on arrival, rent a car and drive to your destination, you may realize that your 30 minute flight took you more than 5 hours in total.
You also have to consider the Amdahl's law: a 10x speedup on 10% of the project is just a 9% speedup overall.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I will just point out the benefit is not as obvious as you think. Developers have consistently overestimated LLM I think there are two different claims here: - developers overestimate productivity gains, which is a solid finding in many of these studies. Skepticism of extremely large productivity gains is warranted and I flatly disbelieve "10x uplift" claims. - LLMs give no productivity uplift at all, which is much…
A few months ago, I heard a keynote speaker claim that LLMs did not give any measurable productivity gains, except in two fields: customer support and software development, where they resulted in about 30% productivity improvement. I forgot if he presented any sources, and if he did, I forgot those, but it sounds plausible to me.
But instead of productivity, I'm much more interested in using it to improve quality. You've got a tireless reviewer who is always ready to review your code and catch any gaps.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#255Earlier 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.
How do you know that what it produces is correct?
I’m wondering if by the time you have been explicit enough in your prompt you might as well have looked up what you needed.
The expression is always terse so it’s not as if you are saving much typing.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#256> 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. 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 love AI but one thing that is a bummer is: Skills that used to be straightforward but people generally never took the time to learn are now trivial with AI.
Things like regex and CSS are not that hard if you take some time to study them. People don't though. Now I don't have that advantage anymore since AI can do them so well. Or... Maybe that could be an advantage since there will be even less people learning it.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The parallels you can draw between LLMs and calculators.. just don't make sense. The technology doesn't matter, you can compare to say the power loom from the 1700's. I'm comparing the reaction of humans; human's haven't changed that much. They always react the same when they feel threatened and emotionally challenged by a technology.
One up. To Aristotle and Plato. Where Plato was against writing because people will become forgetful if they don’t train their minds remembering things.
It was Socrates that was skeptical about writing. We only know this because his student Plato wrote it down.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#258I think folks ITT are trivializing the issue here. Many keep drawing parallels to LLMs being akin to the loom or calculator. That seems intellectually dishonest to me. Those tools were not anthropomorphized interfaces, nor were they instant gratification. To do significant things with a calculator, you still had to know maths, order of operations, formulas, etc. We didn't lose mathematicians as a result of the calculator, nor did the calculator play with our emotions.
I have linked this elsewhere in this thread, but the studies on this matter suggest a worse outcome than just losing hand crafted or "artisanal" software: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721
> These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.
> We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own.
This issue is not that we are losing the ability to write good software by hand. It is possible we are losing our internal tools to learn new things by circumventing a necessary part of the process required by our biology.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming The productivity uplift measured in some of these reports is from more tasks being done, not from developers giving themselves more idle time during the day. If we do see job losses from AI, my feeling is that it’s going to be concentrated in people with an attitude like this one where workers try to remain anchore…
thats absolutely true regarding wysiwyg projects like a small website. aside from temporary cost savings, systematically ignoring institutional knowledge in favor of mass output is not gonna do humanity any favors ..
Yeah institutional knowledge is hard to capture, even more with agentic coding.
I just compressed what would take a team a few months to deliver in one or two months, the amount of gotcha I spot from the existing system we work on everyday is staggering.
How to deliver and keep these feedback is difficult, the other teams are overwhelmed by other tasks, so any tickets or communications will be forgotten in a few months.
And as an external ressources allowed to use frontier model, I have a hard time to keep up with my own pace, and all that institutional knowledge will be lost both by my employer and client.
Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
#260Earlier 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?
I think it is because people have preferences for top-down vs bottom-up learning strategies and bottom-up is what the education system is built around.
I suspect top-down learners are who benefit massively from LLMs while bottom-up learners think they are bullshit engines.
As a top-down learner myself, Claude is really the best technology of my lifetime. I can completely understand though how a bottom-up learner could see Claude as an afront to their fundamental epistemology.
Because it is.