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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6755 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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There are lots of tools out there that are used to detect LLM-produced writing or code. Well, the same tools can be used to reject code that is too human if you flip the final check!

An acquaintance of mine got slapped with the same thing recently. Management has since walked it back because it caused an avalanche of technical debt, but at no point did they ever explain why that kpi was instituted in the first place. Did you get any kind of explanation of the goal they're trying to hit?

Based on announcements and videos from the highest level people at my company: it is using LLMs to massively increase worker productivity. The productivity increase is not optional. They tell positive anecdotes about being shocked at how fast someone is delivering results and then learning it was by using an LLM to help. Or at least that's the story being told.

This is the push incentive for new tool adoption.

My guess is if they don’t understand technical debt and path dependencies to begin with, in no way are they going to understand that you can institute a KPI for anything. It’s what you measure that actually matters. People in the SOC have been dealing with this forever in infosec.

"The more you use AI, the better you get at using it. The better you get at using it, the better code it produces. If we don't make you use it, no one will use it because you want it to write better code."

Broadly I imagine it was:

  1. We think that these tools are going to be very important.
  2. The more senior the dev, the more they tend to resist even trying out new tools or workflows.
  3. Therefore we will literally force you for at least the next six months.

I have some sympathy for this perspective, having seen two very skilled devs just become fundamentally obsolete and impossible to work with because they refused to give up using tools from twenty/thirty years ago.

The more senior the dev, the more they tend to resist even trying out new tools or workflows.

That isn't true at all in my experience. But it is true that more senior devs are less impressed by "new and shiny", instead being very critical about "what problems does this solve better than my current tools do".

One of the things that annoys me about mandating LLMs is that, generally speaking, you have to hold tech guys back from adopting new stuff. They are notorious for going all in on things which have issues for the company (security and compliance flaws, etc) and have to get walked back. They will even set up shadow IT departments just to get stuff done better. If LLMs are truly as useful as the hype says, there's no need to mandate using them. The people for whom they solve problems will trip over themselves to try to use them.

My father was a senior software architect that was a pioneer in SIEM log analysis. Sumo Logic was the last company he worked at before entering retirement and before that he worked for ArcSight when it was acquired by HP and LogLogic before that. The stories he used to tell me about needing to “hold the tech guys back” drove him and other senior developers crazy.

The requirements would be defined, the guidelines would be established, the objectives already determined and then you always had the other guys (as well as management) trying to fuck with shit. The amount of screaming matches they all got into in meetings was incredible. During one instance one of the senior women developers said aloud sarcastically “what should our goal be?,” and he sarcastically said “I think our goal should be log analysis…,” to shame the rest of the people in attendance. Yeah. It was that bad.

The corporate types love to split the difference with new tech. First they'll ban it as a security risk or whatever. Then they'll allow (or mandate) some gimped version which may or may not still have the security/compliance flaws, but definitely lacks the advantages of the forbidden unrestricted version.

This. You can't use Claude Code from Russia legally, anyway, so there's a literal cargo cult going on, with a whole bunch of stakeholders furiously pretending that some outdated version of Qwen the LLM team managed to onboard is good for agentic coding.

It really, really depends, especially since I’m talking senior in age terms ie 50+. But we eventually had to fire a 3d artist for refusing point blank to learn the industry-standard tool that the rest of the team was using, for example. He was perfectly fast on what he had but it didn’t scale and he couldn’t work with the rest of the team.

That aside, a lot of the programmers I worked with considered themselves gurus, and were very invested in the practices that they had been taught at their expensive computer science degree. They were legitimately good at what they did but they clearly considered LLMs an inferior replacement for their skills. The kind of people who insist on VIM over an IDE and will argue for days about whether Python private functions should be prefixed with underscore.

Tl;dr: a lot of programmers are genuinely in a rut, and a lot of others are more interested in writing beautiful code than solving problems.

The kind of people who insist on VIM over an IDE and will argue for days about whether Python private functions should be prefixed with underscore.

My people! If the world loses them, it will be poorer for it.

I am not a professional developer. But in my IT experience, it’s helpful to have a mix of wary skeptics and early adopters for many kinds of technology. Strongarming your skeptics before you have to is a mistake. And while I believe much that I’ve heard about the benefits of coding agents, nobody knows what the final picture will look like. The grumpy old fogeys aren’t prophets, and I am not saying that they are, but they come by their battle scars honestly.

it’s helpful to have a mix of wary skeptics and early adopters for many kinds of technology

Granted! And I'm been the wary skeptic on a lot of things. In this case, given the unique and potentially transformative nature of the technology, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the managers who decided that the greybeards needed some experience with AI products so that they can judge from a position of knowledge not prejudice. Ideally that should employ the carrot rather than the pointy stick, but occasionally you still need the pointy stick.

I also coerce my interns into using it (and pay for the subscriptions myself). In that case it's more for knowledge lookup more than code, because in my opinion getting used to having a personal tutor permanently on call is the best gift I can give them.

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