I was a competitive programmer, coded non-stop in many languages for 15+ years.

I haven't touched a line of code in over 6 months, didn't even look at it, but the work I do is faster and higher quality than ever.

Not sure how I feel about it

This is akin to sticking to hand tools after the development of the electric motor.

There is no going back to writing code the old way. I don't see that happening in the industry, ever.

The grievances listed here are 100% real, but not fundamental - with some practice you can prompt an LLM to great effect without it taking the reins from you. If you let it write the code, it does become a management job more than an engineering job. That said, I do believe that there must be a way to structure your workflow such that the LLM becomes your read-only pair programmer/rubber duck while you yourself get to do the fun parts of coding.

LLMs and generative AI took what means to be a human away for many, not just programmers. The upcoming unrest will be fascinating.

This is a totally fine position to take - if you have no intention of staying in the field as a professional.

The environmental aspects can be solved.

Quality is a measure of the person driving the process, models can write code better than the average engineer.

The impact on learning, seniority etc is the one big unknown - but I believe can/will also be solved.

> AI is not inevitable

I have a hard time believing this. The businesses employing us and the businesses competing with them will view handwritten code as an evasion of financial responsibility. That does not mean inevitability is positive or worth welcoming with open arms. But it is so inevitable at this point.

It's not all black and white.

Do I write less and less code myself? Yes. Do I read less and less code? Maybe. Does it always matter? No. Sometimes, the agent writes code in a project or section of code that is sensitive and deserves a thorough review. Sometimes, it's in a tool that you would never have had the time to write if you didn't have an agent. Or it can be in a project that is so well covered by TDD that you can be confident that it won't break. There could be performance regressions or duplication / code creep, but once you realize it, you can ask an agent to simplify the code and find ways to prevent that from happening again.

There are cleanup / technical-debt-reduction tasks that I thought would never be done in my lifetime due to lack of time and other priorities. But now, I'm blasting through them with Claude. I cannot imagine the lack of productivity I would suffer if deprived from an agent.

That said, I agree with most points the author makes. It becomes harder to grok the code, just as it becomes hard to navigate without GPS navigation once you are used to it. It is maybe necessary to force oneself to do a development task once in a while without the help of an agent in order to stay sharp.

But stop using LLMs? that sounds counterproductive.

Good article.

I don't use LLMs in my personal work too. The reasons are like yours.

If you care about your privacy, security, skills, personal feelings and personal growth, you mustn't use AI or LLMs.

I have the personal rules regarding LLM coding:

- Try to prove the concept early on. When you start spinning in circles, then it might be time for a different approach

- I’ve had a lot of success with projects that have not started out as LLM codebases. And adding features one by one and testing really carefully by hand

- UI generated by LLMs are overly verbose. The key lies in the iteration. What you can cut, move or approach differently. But you have to have taste.

> "LLMs expose the literacy gap between great and mediocre coders. If you can't see how bad the generated code is, LLMs will only make you not see it faster."

I wholeheartedly believe that if the general trend in SWE goes without hiring new grads/self-taught people (who can still use AI-assistance in their work), we're gonna be seeing huge outsourcing to AIaaS companies and generally become tremendously dependent on them when existing pool of seasoned programmers goes extinct and the work doesn't intrigue training new people.

Although there is cheap, open source models running locally or available at scale on reasonable prices without compromising programmer integrity.

> I just personally feel squeamish about having my work being done by rather skeezy companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or, god forbid, Cursor/SpaceX.

Local models exist. Your data doesn't have to leave your computer.

I work on what should be pretty simple things (3D models of projects for CNC machines) and based on flet.dev recently announcing 1.0 and a quick test one-shotting a convincing protototype of a drawing program description which heretofore every such system had failed at miserably, decided to proceed with it.

I got a quick prototype of a rabbet box generator:

https://studio.flet.dev/run/bicQWc3Aul/

but the geometry was all wrong and ultimately required that I describe the calculation of the position and dimensions of each element in exhaustive detail in order to get a usable DXF (the wireframe preview is still all messed up) which eventually worked to make a box:

https://community.carbide3d.com/uploads/default/original/3X/...

I was also drawing the design up in an interactive CAD/CAM program, and modeling it in BlockSCAD/OpenSCAD (and dropping into BelfrySCAD to figure out rotation):

https://www.blockscad3d.com/community/projects/2169316

(and speaking of rotation, at this time, the sliding and hinged lid options open on opposite sides in the preview...)

Since then, I've made a very simple generator which simple does a box decorated with lines, arcs, and circles on each side --- my intention is to dis-assemble that and use it to write a Domain Specific Language implementation for creating such designs and previewing them and writing out DXFs --- which is a long-winded way of saying I've been finding this tooling frustrating to use, but potentially useful to make rough drafts of programming templates which can then be used as a starting point for more traditional coding.

Eventually all of this will go into:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

I’m not disagreeing with the author, but if you look at his dealbreakers: most of them will be resolved over time (quality, maintainability, environmental impact & even politics), they are not so much against LLMs as they are against the current versions of them.

The only arguments against AI itself are about cognitive decline and “I like coding” While there is nothing wrong with those preferences, it’s akin to saying “I like building furniture with only hand tools, and not doing it by hand leads to decline in your ability.”

I've been suggesting my junior colleagues recently the following mindset: for the last 5 years you have been milking cows, that was your job, and you were great at it. But this job ceased to exist [somewhere around August this year when Opus 5 appeared] You have a new job: you are a barista now [and you are going to serve oat milk]

You can still manually type code, it can be a great hobby, but it is unlikely that someone will pay you a full time salary for doing it

> Entrepreneur at heart

The post sounds more like a programmer at heart, and that's totally fine.

To me, being an entrepreneur is more about building products, solving problems, and creating business value. LLMs help to deliver bug fixes, new features, and entirely new products faster.

I've struck the balance of using it at work but not at home.

At work I still read through every line in the diff (unless it's a personal util/non-production facing/critical etc). Even with this I feel less 'in touch' with my work code than I do with my home code.

Genuine question: Will you also reject the results and fixes regarding the current PHP CVEs until there are handcrafted versions? And - a question from another perspective - would you be open to using Mistral in a self hosted environment?

I'm not writing a blog post just for this, but the man is right. For me, the only thing I expecte from a LLM is a StackOverflow/Google that actually works and maybe some static code analysis.

I see AI coding as instant legacy code.

The brittle slop happens when you tack feature on top of feature because it’s fast and easy now.

The higher quality stuff happens when you dive into the details of what you/the agent implemented (looking at code, with agent, or not) trying to make the current feature set work better.

IMO there will be outsized competitive advantage to the latter. Features are now cheap. But quality remains rare.

I see LLM usage as more of a spectrum than a binary decision. For the most critical parts of my day job, I still don't commit anything from an LLM that I haven't checked myself. My brain has never felt busier and more engaged on that stuff. But then I also produce absolute mountains of code (side projects, internal tooling) that I don't have time to review and frankly it doesn't really matter what the code looks like. You can choose how much to engage your brain. Every project is different.

> I feel that LLMs and their overtly verbose output trick less knowledgeable programmers of the quality of their output. When Claude spits out refactored code with tons of comments, documenting each method and variable, and tests for everything as well, it looks impressive, at a first glance. But if you dig deeper, it's sometimes just complete bullshit.

This is pretty spot on. But it's important to note that the resulting code, is still often significantly better than what those developers used to produce. Especially under tight deadlines and pressure to complete CRUD like interfaces. We simply can't afford spending a whole day tweaking a sortable table on the web anymore.

You don't need to use LLMs for coding to stay "competitive" with your colleagues.

I work for a FAANG, we have unlimited AI credits to be used on any model we want, with basically any tooling we want.

My whole team massively uses AI, I barely do. I use not even 10% of the tokens that they do. Yet I have not only the highest rate of PRs raised, but also the highest rate of PRs I reviewed, and the second lowest number of revisions per PR.

AI is all about fake productivity. You feel productive while you're achieving the same, if not less (or even often, nothing at all).

Long term it's pretty obvious that people heavily using AI will become a lot less productive, if not simply unable to work as software engineers. My colleagues are already scared.

In fact, as a challenge to anyone who says they "haven't written a line of code by hand in X amount of time", go do a test. Try to write any code without any LLM use for just 30 minutes.

I guess nobody cares about, if some one use LLM or hand written code. They all care if you are hired and deliver the output comparable to others with all their requirement fulfilled. I still remember how wordpress developers were against elementor during its early days and look how pagebuilders became default choice now for wordpress.

It is perhaps confirmation bias, but I feel like I see fewer and fewer of these posts on HN. All respect to the author, life is too short to force yourself to do something you don’t like. But, these post seem more like a goodbye to the train that has already pulled out of the station.

The quibble I would make is with the “code is not that good” and the implication that they are so much better at coding while those who have adopted AI are “mediocre”. It’s certainly possible this is right. I would be the first to call myself a middling programmer. I am still waiting to be inducted into the Real Developer (TM) society. (Is it a card? Or does someone teach you a handshake?). But my question is, why, if you’re an ace programmer, can you not get good results out of an LLM? These things are endlessly configurable. They are begging to be tested and, dare I say, engineered to your system and way of doing things. So, why are your results still bad?

The author's not wrong that left completely to their own devices, and especially if your working on something that's not well represented in their training data, LLMs will make a mess of things. But a Real Programmer (TM) isn't doing that. (Or so I assume. like I said, I haven't gotten the pin. Or is it a medal? A certificate perhaps?).

For me, I don't mind if people want code written by LLMS. What I DO have a problem with is people handing over their problem solving to LLMS.

If someone uses Resharper to make some ugly code pretty, fine, I don't mind - as long as they can understand and explain the result. My issue I'm running into daily which drives me nuts is stopping people in their PR's and asking "Why did you do it this way? This seems like an odd approach" and get "Oh I dunno, Claude wrote it". Then what the hell are you checking it in for?

Between SO, Resharper + Fancy IDE tools, and the mountain of plug-and-play cloud services we have, I think the era of 'writing everything yourself' was already dwindling. But at least if someone chose one framework or library or SO post over another, they could explain why they chose it later on. Some sort of domain knowledge was being built up and transferred between devs over time (and I'm not talking about documentation). What I see more and more is systems being checked into production where the 'author' doesn't fully understand what it's doing, then it breaks in a way they don't expect, and then I see a team of clowns all with their claude terminals open desperately typing "WHAT DOES THIS ERROR MEAN" because nobody understands why it was built that way in the first place.

Fine get LLMS to help write your code, but do your job and handle the problem solving part. What are you being paid for otherwise?

Yeah... This is about to age really badly, not to say that the principles in the post are incorrect, but this person doesn't seem to realize that they are in a free market and that each model improves on the last on almost every aspect. We will see what they'll think about this choice when all their competitors do 100s of peoples worth of work just with a few people

Reminds me of Oscar, the accountant from The Office who would refuse using a calculator.

This is a roundabout way of saying you're leaving the profession.

We now have people commonly running multiple concurrent programming tasks, while automatically and interactively testing them, reviewing them, and validating them. They're then handed for human review, where little is found because the quality regime is now set so high. We're talking weeks of development + testing/validating time brought down into the realm of days.

So this is pure "my horse & cart are just as good as the motorcar"-levels of argument. If I bury my head in the sand long enough, and deep enough, this will all just blow over, and we'll go back to doing stuff significantly slower/worse any day now...

The quality of stuff I am shipping today is the highest it has ever been, and tested/validated significantly more comprehensively. Why? Because time/resources was the limitation, not willingness or skill. I always wanted to test for every single possible edge case/scenario, but it wasn't in the time-budget (and diminish returns). Now I don't need to make that trade-off.

That's kind of audacious, for a php programmer

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I will not be using a modern compiler, I will be using [assembly|punch-cards].

So I have some questions for agentic dev aficionados:

- Why should I even start vibing up my desired tools and projects when I can just wait it out so a better clanker emerges 6 months down the line?

- What guarantee is there that Rust is the best programming language for vibe coding when the models could improve to directly output assembly? What incentive do you have in vibing up something?

Garment manufacturers do not hire knitters to knit jumpers.

Looks like you didn't want that milkshake anyway...

you can do that for personal/passion projects, but you will just get fired if you don't use LLMs at your job

That's an extremely privileged take.

> Before anyone calls me a luddite or a AI-skeptic

If you're afraid of being called a luddite, you've already lost.

You shouldn't value the opinion of those who would insult you for not wanting to offload something you find intellectually fulfilling to a machine.

I'm using it for Rust, easily handle 1mil/sec connections and I'm okay with this.

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Very well-written, and undeniably relatable! Sadly, I am compelled by forces beyond my cognitive control to respond, especially to points I've seen and refuted before. If nothing else, I hope it's helpful to know the other side of these things :)

  using LLMs in my codings

I hope it's not too combative to start by saying this is a huge red flag for someone who hasn't checked in on what post-Mythos agentic engineering is like. Of course LLMs are undeniably involved, but it comes off like someone quitting social media by decrying protocols (or worse: series of tubes). LLMs are an essential component that has finally thawed the AI Winter, yes, but they're still just parts of a system. A harness is far from a mere wrapper around a neural network, to say the least.

  people argue that "LLMs are just a tool", but really, it is not, it is a SERVICE

That dichotomy is a false one (many software tools are productionized as services), but the underlying sentiment is clear and common: that querying a chatbot is akin to asking another human to do something for you. This comes up most often in Reddit's vicious "AI wars" about digital art, where generating an image cannot be a creative act on the users' part because it's more like comissioning a painter than it is like painting.

I think the response is obvious (and why this is merely an aside rather than a "dealbreaker" proper): this is granting personhood to neural networks, which no one who supports this point would admit to in a thousand years. Either they're people and you're asking a person to think/paint for you, or they're inanimate machines and it's a tool; there is no middle ground. (If unconvinced: what about a camera makes it a tool to be used rather than a peer to be delegated to? It can draw a picture in milliseconds!)

  the current hype and craze for them

This is an underlying worlview thing that poisons the rest of the analysis, namely that nothing (important) ever happens. That surely this just a hype moment that will pass like the iPhone moment and the Bitcoin moment, and that anyone who says otherwise is surely crazy. It's begging the whole discussion.

  And it's no wonder, there have been several studies confirming this:

The first paper is Microsoft's[1] recent incredibly informal survey of how people feel working in a career they know to be changing beyond their recognition, and with tools that didn't really exist 6 months ago. Yes, orchestrating agents is a different experience than we're used to; no, a simple survey could never prove that they are cognitively dangerous.

The second paper is notoriously misleading, and a stain upon MIT -- observing brain activity differences between people who have to think deeply and write an essay by hand and people who type a sentence and then sit there until the allotted time is over is not surprising, and definitely doesn't show what they clearly intended the flashy graphics and suggestive conclusion to show (that using chatbots leads to brain damage). There's more, but long story short: they're manipulating valid techniques to make a tool seem like a uniquely-dangerous toxin, when the exact same effect applies to all previous tools of note (calculators, typewriters, word processors, translators, even Grammarly).

The third paper is just highly-speculative, deeply-polemic schlock, obviously.

  The quality of the output is not that great

1. This is an unfalsifiable claim, which is lucky because the goalposts have had to be moved many times to get to "looks impressive, but is sometimes complete bullshit". Turing refutes this thinking quite directly in `§6.5` of Computing Machinery and Intelligence (CMaI)[2].

2. Many experienced engineers disagree, to say the least, as do companies investing billions.

3. Again, you can't help but sense the author hasn't used post-Mythos models; even if they have, the fact that such a huge leap has occured in just the previous 24 months is overwhelming evidence against this notion. The linked sources being A) an /r/AntiAI post (!) and B) a pre-Mythos essay don't help.

  Congratulations, you have let OpenAI/Anthropic/Elon Musk dictate what your code does and why.

I'm quickly getting the sense that the author is too vitriolic and dug in to be reasoned out of these views :( Hopefully it goes without saying that "your code sucks because you gave it to [HATED_FIGURE]!" is an invective, not a premise. For the rest: see previously preceeding section, which is indeed "closely related".

  I like writing code

Same! I also like playing video games and tending to plants -- just had a blast on Beyond All Reason last night, and my Philodendron Florida Ghost just unfurled a wonderfully-ghostly new leaf. Neither are my career.

  Environmental aspect

I'm most dissapointed by this part, as this person is Finnish and should know better about the Google story :( What's being framed as some unheard-of act of environmental terror is really just the planned and almost-completely-permitted early harvest of a small plot of "planted forest", i.e. a tree farm, which are one of Finland's main industries. Everything in this map in blue is tree farms, with the Muhos site in the middle: https://i.imgur.com/HyTVp1I.jpeg [3]

The preceeding 'this technology uses power' point doesn't need refutation, but it underlines the problem with the point above: this is post-hoc reasoning. Cutting down a tree farm in Finland is so, so far down the list of priorities for actual environmental activism that it's hard to describe, and yet this post has nothing about not working for companies that serve non-vegan meals for lunch, uses air conditioning, or flies people to yearly retreats.

  But I just personally feel squeamish about having my work being done by rather skeezy companies

Even if this were relevant (which it's not in a post-GLM-5.3 world[3]) it offers no argument, and thus cannot support the conclusion.

  Even if some technology or tool sticks around, it does not necessarily mean its good idea to work with it.

Also not an argument. Heroin isn't inadvisable because it's "here to stay", but rather because it's a toxic, extremely chemically addictive narcotic that kills many thousands of well-intentioned users every year, and ruins thousands more families before that.

TL;DR: Apologies to the (again, clear & well-intentioned) author, but this essay is like heroin -- I dislike it!

---

[1]: BTW, there's a reason Microsoft published this, and it's the opposite bias that this author assumed. Read this article and see how deep the conflict of interest admission is buried -- it says it all: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/anthropic-training...

[2]: pp. 12 of https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...

[3]: That tool, more info, definitive Finnish zoning documents available at this ChatGPT link (ew, I know, I agree!): https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6af081bc590881919c7231419db48a72

[4]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

The comparison with heroin frankly is bizarre, as if using LLMs was purely hedonistic activity.

LLMs are tools like motor vehicles. They allow you to get somewhere, quickly but brutishly. You won't be able to appreciate the beautiful scenery much, as it rushes by. You're going to have to compensate for the exercise you would have gotten, had you walked, or it's going to be unhealthy. It's undeniably bad for the environment (electric or not) and has other negative externalities. The politics of many of the countries supplying most motor vehicle fuel to the world are beyond fascist by modern leftist standards. Yet, we depend on them, we have constructed a lot of the infrastructure we need to live around their existence, and even if every city became walkable over night, the last mile for most transport would be covered by some motor vehicle. There are many "what ifs" surrounding motor vehicles where the answer boils down to: "Well, then we're fucked". But we're not fucked today, and so on it goes.

Of course you can try not to partake in motor vehicles, and insofar as you don't make a moral grandstand about it, that's totally fine with me. But the rest of the world is in it for the ride. The first cars weren't very good either.

I agree with most points made by the author, however the cognitive impact depends on how you use LLMs. Here's an example: I build so many Phoenix / Elixir applications and one of the things I really hate is the amount of boilerplate code I need to write for every project. It is exactly the same (eg. Setting up vite, removing existing mix based node integrations) and modifying scaffolded code to adhere to my design. I already know CSS inside out and Tailwind CSS too. So, by offloading the task of rewiring existing scaffolded CRUD templates, I would argue the opposite - I am saving precious cognitive load from doing repetitive data entry work.

That's why I have a very clear personal policy of always being the architect and instructing LLMs what AND how a task must be done as opposed to blindly just trusting them with everything - that is how you lose your ability to think.

Maybe an LLM would help him avoid the 418 error I am getting?

This sounds like, “I’m not going to buy any food at the store at all; I’m going to toil the soil for any nutrient I put in my mouth.”

Cool story bro, but it sounds like you are trying to convince yourself.

See you back here in a month, or so.