The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
The author discusses the cognitive dissonance experienced by software engineers who criticize Large Language Models (LLMs) while simultaneously relying on them for daily development tasks. It highlights the tension between human-centric engineering values and the practical utility of AI coding tools.
Why it matters
It captures a prevalent cultural conflict within the tech industry regarding the adoption of AI tools versus the preservation of human agency in software development.
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, and I also feel like that sometimes because of this dissonance, but I don’t think I am alone with it.
This week I was at Local-First Conf in Berlin, and the dissonance was everywhere. Armin Ronacher had just given a talk about building machine entities . He created Flask and was one of the early team members of Sentry, so he is clearly a good software engineer. Just recently he founded his company Earendil, which builds Pi.dev, an “open-source coding agent harness”. After the talk you could ask questions via Discord, which would be read out loud on stage, and I asked:
are you accepting PRs for Pi, or how do you handle the flood of PRs from LLMs?
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