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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#281

Post by bicepjai »

bagacrap wrote: post #254
bicepjai wrote: post #214

I think the author slips into the same pattern he’s criticizing. He says LLM fans shouldn’t label skeptics as “afraid” then he turns around and labels the fans as “insecure” or “not very good at programming.” It’s the same move; guessing what’s going on in someone’s head instead of sticking to what actually happened and what the tools can or can’t do. The simpler truth is LLMs are great in some cases and painful in o…

It's not fans that he's criticizing but evangelists.

Thanks for pointing it out. I actually meant evangelists

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#282

Post by just6979 »

trollbridge wrote: post #234
ambicapter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there's also, "this looks fine but if I actually had written this code I would've naturally spent more time on it which would have led me to anticipate the future of this code just a little bit more and I will only feel that awkwardness when I come back to this code in two weeks, and then we'll do it all over again". It's a spectrum.

Right. And greenfield code is some of the most enjoyable to write, yet apparently we should let robots do the thing we enjoy the most, and reserve the most miserable tasks for humans, since the robots appear to be unable to do this. I have yet to see an LLM or coding agent that can be prompted with "Please fix subtle bugs" or "Please retire this technical debt as described in issue #6712."

If you're willing to purchase enough tokens, you can prompt and agent to loop and fuzz its way to "retire* this technical debt as described in issue #6712". But then you still need to review it and make sure it's not just doing a "debt-swap", like some kind of metaverse financial swindler. So you're spending money to avoid fixing tech debt, but adding in the need to review "someone else's code". And to take ownership of that code!

*(Of course, depending on the issue, it could be doing anything from surpressing logs so existing tests pass, to making useless-but-passing tests, to brute-forcing special cases, to possibly actually fixing something.)

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#283

Post by just6979 »

woah wrote: post #51

The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. Pro-LLM influencers are sometimes corny, but it's sort of like any other influencer, they are incentivized to make everything sound exciting to get clicks. Nobody was complaining about 3d printer influencers raving about how printing replacement dishwasher parts was going to change everything. LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even…

re: 3d printer hype: nah, there were people out there saying "umm, yeah so FDM is great for rapid prototyping and some small parts, but kinda terrible for lots of application. Being isotropic and lacking creep is way more important than you guys printing little boats that don't even float yet understand."

You just couldn't hear them over all the hype.

On the otherhand, that hype did help bring a lot of investment which begat things like desktop resin printers and prosumer-level SLS and such advanced tech that actually can replace much existing manufacturing tech.

Current "AI"/LLM situation sure seems like a bubble, but in the end transformer-based ML is obviously insanely powerful for many domains and it's going to change and create industries. But just like there isn't a 3d printer in every house, and it doesn't seem like that will be a thing anytime soon, it doesn't seem likely that we're all going to just be prompt engineers.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#284

Post by Terr_ »

pxc wrote: post #237
Terr_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS I had assumed most of them had either filtered out at some stage (an early one being college intro CS classes), ended up employed somewhere that didn't seem to mind their output, or perpetually circle on LinkedIn as "Lemons" for their next prey/employer. My gut feeling is that messy code-gen will increase their numbers rather than decrease them. L…

> filtered out at some stage (an early one being college intro CS classes) Most schools' CS departments have shifted away from letting introductory CS courses perform this function— they go out of their way to court students who are unmotivated or uninterested in computer science fundamentals. Hiring rates for computer science majors are good, so anything to up those enrollment numbers makes the school look better on…

From my dated experience in a CS-adjacent major, I'm torn between "that's bad, people need to care about the craft" versus "that's good, CS was a bit too ivory-tower/theory focused".

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#285

Post by LAC-Tech »

ookblah wrote: post #117
LAC-Tech wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I use LLMs for things I am not good at. But I also know I am not good at them. No one is good at everything. 100% fine.

hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk. i mean if you have imposter syndrome then this feeling will always be prevalent. how do you know what you are good at or not? i might be competent enough to have progressed this far in my career as in "results", but comparison to people i consider "good" devs always puts in that doubt. i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of…

hmm, maybe you are not as good at using llms as you think then? lol jk.

Oh yeah that's entirely possible. I think mentioned it several times in the article. One always has to be open to the possibility that one is just ignorant.

i guess it strikes a chord when someone in the same breath of claiming to be open minded makes a backhand comment where people who like llms might just must be a shitty programmer or whatever.

It does somewhat depress me that even in a very short article, people can't figure out I am talking about the irritating LLM Evangelists, not everyone who uses LLMs. It's in the title.

i get the point, but that line doesn't quite land the way you think it does.

Landed well enough to #1 on this hell site :)

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#286

Post by ben_w »

jason_oster wrote: post #206
daveguy wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but do you honestly think LLMs have reached the level of average programmer? Or is it more a matter of "they can churn out code until I see something that is close enough and I'll make the last few edits"? Also curious if you publish your working setup or if it changes as fast as the LLMs? Seems like you may have a more stable setup than most given how you are developing tools in the space.

Honestly? LLMs are currently above average at programming. We've all been through The Daily WTF at least once. That's representative of the average. (Although some examples are more egregious than others.)

> The Daily WTF at least once. That's representative of the average

I'd say The Daily WTF are the more spectacularly weird and wrong, not representative; I've seen a few things deserving to be on their site in real life*, but the average I've seen has been much better than that.

It's difficult to be sure, but I think these models are roughly like someone with 1-3 years of experience, though the worst codebase(s) I've seen have been from person(s) who somehow lasted a decade or two in the industry.

* 1000 lines inside an always-true if-block, a pantheon of god classes that poorly re-invent the concept of named properties, copy-pasting class files rather than subclassing even after I'd added comments about needing to de-duplicate things in them, and that was all the same project.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#287

Post by [deleted] »

jason_oster wrote: post #203
raddan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is fresh in my mind, so my recollections might be a little hazy. I think the only issue I personally had when writing a decoder was keeping the alignment of various fields right. I wrote the decoder in C# and if I remember correctly I tried to get fancy with some modern-ish deserialization code. I think I eventually resorted to writing a rather ugly but simple low-level byte reader. Nevertheless I found…

You should try a similar task with a recent model (Opus 4.5, GPT 5.2, etc) and see if there are any improvements since your last attempt. I also encourage using a coding agent. It can use test files that you provide, and perform compile-test loops to work out any mistakes. It sounds like you used an older model, and perhaps copy-pasted code from a chat session. (Just guessing, based on what you described.)

[deleted]

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#288

Post by bird0861 »

esoterae wrote: post #268
SchemaLoad wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how some people seem to treat using an LLM as part of their personality in a borderline cult like way. So someone saying they don't use it or don't find it useful triggers an anger response in them.

If a vegan LLM evangelist crossfitter comes up to you at party, which one do they talk about first?

Rust.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#289

Post by jraph »

_zagj wrote: post #277
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows. Maybe all the AI people will have their skills atrophy and by the time the AI crash happens and none of the models can be run, they don't be employable any more. I'm happy to take that gamble if it saves my conscience.

> the AI crash happens and none of the models can be run How could this happen with local models already in service?

I assume they'd go outdated pretty fast.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#290

Post by meowface »

moron4hire wrote: post #171
meowface wrote: post #23

I feel no strong need to convince others. I've been seeing major productivity boosts for myself and others since Sonnet 3.5. Maybe for certain kinds of projects and use cases it's less good, maybe they're not using it well; I dunno. I do think a lot of these people probably will be left behind if they don't adopt it within the next 3 years, but that's not really my problem.

What's there to be left behind on? That's like arguing people who stick to driving cars with manual transmissions are going to get left behind when buses "inevitably get good." The whole point of the AI coding thing is that it lets inexperienced people create software. What skill moat are you building that a skilled software developer won't be able to pick up in 20 minutes?

That is definitely not the point of it.
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