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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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The topic of the use of LLMs in various situations is always super complicated. Sometimes it's magic; sometimes it's bollocks and all that.1 I don't yet have fully-consistent rules for myself, as things are always changing as well. Terrance Tao just listed a possible set of criteria to consider:

I believe that the creation of visualization apps to illustrate mathematical or scientific concepts is a particularly favorable use case for modern coding agents, as many of the downside risks attached to other LLM use cases are limited:

  1. Not mission-critical. As such apps are not authorative sources of truth and only used for secondary purposes, a small positive error rate in the output can be acceptable.
  2. Stand-alone. As the applets are not destined to be incorporated into a larger codebase or literature, the technical debt incurred by delegating all the coding to an LLM agent is bounded.
  3. End product is deterministic (and sandboxed). As the applets run on a deterministic language (Javascript), are sandboxed against file or internet access, and do not make any LLM calls at run-time, security and privacy concerns are minimal, and the applet can be maintained without continued premium LLM access or resource-intensive compute.
  4. Not replacing primary skills. While deskilling is the tradeoff one accepts when relying on these tools to accelerate output, I am perfectly willing to forego the opportunity to keep my Javascript skills at a high level, as this is a tertiary skill for me at best in my chosen profession. (I continue to manually program in Lean and in Python to keep in practice with programming in general.)
  5. Not competing with humans. To my knowledge, there is no existing human effort that is being duplicated by these applets (the activity in this direction appears to have peaked two decades ago).

I would however caution against unrestricted LLM use when one or more of the above five favorable situations is not in effect.

I don't know if these are the right set of rules (#5 in particular seems insufficiently justified). But I guess the culture war is all about bickering over lists like this (or, I guess, whether any list like this should be used vs. just letting an LLM do literally everything for you everywhere).

1 - For example, in writing this, I noticed that I always screw up the markdown for numbered lists inside of blockquotes. I typically still just leave blank lines between lines/paragraphs in blockquotes; no particular reason why I do it, but it's most noticeable when it breaks numbered lists. An LLM trivially told me a couple different ways I could do it that will display properly. On the other hand, I spent a decent amount of time yesterday trying to troubleshoot something that was crashing intermittently. It gave me some certainly reasonable troubleshooting steps, but when the basic, good ones ran out, it sort of went insane. It never occurred to the LLM to note that there were some additional debug tools I could enable; I happened to find that in a web search leading to a forum leading to documentation shortly after giving up on the LLM.

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