Why I will not be using LLMs in my coding

mag7269

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.

XCSme

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

mmackh

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.

duendefm

That's kind of audacious, for a php programmer

alexpadula

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

sgt

> 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.

ducktective

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?

shmoil

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

el_psy_congroo

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

BoingBoomTschak

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.

ricardobeat

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.

sreekanth850

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.

iLoveOncall

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.

neya

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.

m00dy

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

Someone1234

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.

RockRobotRock

That's an extremely privileged take.

nickorlow

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.

docheinestages

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

incrudible

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.