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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   25116 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think. What will matter is what the industry at large thinks, and there's a decent chance that they will believe (rightly or wrongly) that everyone needs to use LLMs to be an effective engineer

If you really don't see LLMs adding any value, then you can just lie about using them quite easily. I think they're very useful, but can still see they've become a huge management fad, and I doubt they'll stay like that for more than a year or 2. You can just say you're using AI if they don't check, or send it off on goose chases with filler prompts that you don't actually use the results of if they do.

I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape. But using an LLM isn't that. It is basically delegating tasks to another person and then reviewing the work to make sure it's acceptable.

I just don't understand this mindset at all. There's a certain elegance in the craft for sure, but the value of the end-product is what's always been truly impressive to me. It's like for an architect/builder: Seeing them swing the hammer can be cool, but it's the house that they build that's worth admiration in my eyes. LLMs have thus been a thing of beauty for me since they can get there so much faster, and more robustly. It feels like I have a cheat code to just snap my fingers and pop buildings into existence.

If you really don't see LLMs adding any value, then you can just lie about using them quite easily.

Yeah perhaps. I'm not sure if I would want to lie but it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility either.

I just don't understand this mindset at all. There's a certain elegance in the craft for sure, but the value of the end-product is what's always been truly impressive to me.

I think it's legitimately hard to cross that gap of being wired differently. My reaction is actually pretty similar to yours (but in the opposite direction of course): it's hard for me to understand why someone would care about the end product instead of the process of making it. I have never found some kind of intrinsic value in the stuff I work on, so the perspective of "I can create things faster and that's the part I enjoy" is wildly different from mine. I can understand it in a detached intellectual way, but I can't truly get it. Just different personalities I know, but I sympathize with how foreign other perspectives can seem from oneself.

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