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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't feel completely right.

Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe.

I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this.

edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon and Antirez are part of the hostile LLM evangelists the article criticizes. Although the article does generalize to all LLM evangelists at least in some parts and Simon did react to this here. For these reasons, I haven't ruled him out as a target of this article, at least partly.

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The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live (maybe Antirez a bit less, but they're still not mean about it).

My gut says that is not a property of LLM evangelists, but a property of current internet culture in general. People with strong, divisive, and engaging opinions seem to do well (by some definition of well) online.

This. For every absurd LLM cheerleader, there’s a corresponding LLM minimalist who trots out the “stochastic parrot” line at every possible occasion along with the fact that they do CrossFit and don’t own a TV.

It's weird how some people seem to treat using an LLM as part of their personality in a borderline cult like way. So someone saying they don't use it or don't find it useful triggers an anger response in them.

That is not novel - see language/framework choice, OS (or even distro) preferences, editor wars, indentation. People develop strong opinions about tools, technology, and techniques regardless of domain. LLM maximalists just have the unfortunate capability to generate infinite content about their specific shiny thing.

If a vegan LLM evangelist crossfitter comes up to you at party, which one do they talk about first?

Rust.

Thanks for clarifying for people.

And yeah, as I laid out in the article (that of course, very few people actually read, even though it was short...), I really don't mind how people make code. It's those that try so hard to convince the rest of us I find very suspect.

In my case I don’t even mind if these evangelists try so hard to convince other developers. What I do mind is that they seem to be quite successful in convincing our bosses. So we get things like mandatory LLM usage, minimum number of Claude API calls per day, every commit must be co-authored by Claude, etc.

That sounds horrible.

I'll convince you one day

I think the actual problem is everyone tries to assert how capable or not coding agents currently are, but how useful they are depends so much on what you are trying to get them to do and also on your communication with the model. And often its hard to tell whether you're just prompting it wrong or if they're incapable of doing it.

By now we at least agree that stochastical parrots can be useful. It would be nice if the debate now was less polarized so we could focus on what makes them work better for some and worse for others other than just expectations.

Antirez:

>Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it.

Or maybe it will.

Smart guy, but he can speak for himself.

Who knows. Maybe all the AI people will have their skills atrophy and by the time the AI crash happens and none of the models can be run, they don't be employable any more. I'm happy to take that gamble if it saves my conscience.

> the AI crash happens and none of the models can be run

How could this happen with local models already in service?

I assume they'd go outdated pretty fast.

You seem to be mistaking set and members here. The piece's critique is against the set (LLM Evangelists), not against specific members of the set (the ones you mentioned). One can agree with the point of the piece while still acknowledging there are good programmers who are also LLM evangelists.

You are right, I went a bit too quickly so let me expand a bit my chain of thoughts.

The article is against the set of LLM evangelists who are hostile towards the skeptics.

I 100% agree with the part that basically says fuck you to them.

However, explaining the hostile part with there being the feeling of insecurity (which is plausible but would need evidence) is not fully convincing and it seems dangerous to accept this conclusion and stop looking for the actual reasons this quickly.

And the fact that there are actually good programmers persuaded that LLMs help them weakens the "insecurity" argument quite a bit, at least as the only explanation.

As someone currently pretty much hostile to LLMs, I'm quite interested in what's currently at play but I'm suspicious of claims that initially feel good but are not strongly backed.

Like, if these hostile people were actually shills, we would want to know this and not have closed the eyes too early because of some explanation that felt good, right? Or any actual reason.

Look into the Motte-and-bailey fallacy. That set seriously doesn't exist. Even the people on youtube doing "vibe coding" benchmarks mostly say it's crap. (Well they probably exist on twitter/linkedin.)

This article just functions as flamebait for people who use LLMs to implement whole features to argue the semantics of "vibe coding". All while everyone is ignoring the writing on the wall. That we will soon have boxes going through billions of tokens every second. At that point slopcoding WILL be productive, but only if you build up the skill to differentiate yourself from the top 10% of prompters.

Ah, here we go again. "You have to learn this new skill or get left behind." As if computer science has fundamentally changed.

There is not some new skill that you need to learn if you were already a competent programmer.

That is the basic argument for the utility of stereotypes too. I think the author is engaged in projection. I think the hecklers are the ones revealing their insecurities, which are justified. Even if AI progress were frozen today, the market conditions are going to change in ways that are hard to predict and a little bit of programming knowledge is not going to be the massive arbitrage opportunity that it used to be.

Simon just explores stuff and writes about them. Doesn't mean he uses LLMs for everyting.Antirez likes to question stuff and make them better. Doesn't mean he uses LLMs for everything.

Also their experience is not my experience. I will make my own choices.

I suspect for truly talented people, they just like talking to LLMs. And they're also not 100% focused on programming anymore, so the async nature of it matters more than it does to people who write code full time for a living.

I don't think it's fair to compare people who are already seemingly at the peak of their career, a place to which they got by building skill in coding. And in fact what they have now that's valuable isn't mostly skill but capital. They've built famous software that's widely used.

Also they didn't adopt the your-career-is-ruined-if-you-don't-get-on-board tone that is sickeningly pervasive on LinkedIn. If you believe that advice and give up on being someone who understands code, you sure aren't gonna write Redis or Django.

You should doubt however loud shouting means good programming.

Here have some actual skill

https://github.com/PCBox/PCBox

This guy is half his age and keeps to himself. Pure quality.

> They are probably better than most of us

most top engineers will have their best work locked up in their employer's private repositories

simonw and antirez have an advantage here, and at least the former is very good at self-promotion

It's a tactical error to disagree with influencers in public, much less actually criticize them, since it only arouses the mob. When there's a power difference you have to cede the platform (since they already have it), and try to ask good questions.

Questions like.. did we really even need to invoke particular influencers to discuss this issue? Why does that come up at all, and why is it the top comment? If names and argument from authority can settle issues on HN now, does it work with all credentialed authorities, or only those vocal few with certain opinions?

On the plus side having people listening to influencers calling interpreter languages programming languages you get more job security if they distract enough newcomers to never go bit flipping manually.

I understand your point and how frustrating it is trying to reason with people who think using a tool repeatedly means they understand how it works.

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