Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

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So how do you rectify your anecdotal experience against those made by public figures in the industry who we can all agree are at least pretty good engineers? I think that's important because if we want to stay ~anonymous, neither you nor I can verify the reputation of one another (and therefore, one another's relative master of the "Craft").

Here are some well known names who are now saying they regularly use LLM's for development. For many of these folks, that wasn't true 1-2 years ago:

- Donald Knuth: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/papers/claude-c...

- Linus Torvalds: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/hobby-github-repo-shows-l...

- John Carmack: https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1909311174845329874

My point being - some random guy on the internet says LLM's have never been useful for them and they only output garbage vs. some of the best engineers in the field using the same tools, and saying the exact opposite of what you are.

>Here are some well known names who are now saying they regularly use LLM's for development. For many of these folks, that wasn't true 1-2 years ago:

This is a huge overstatement that isn't supported by your own links.

- Donald Knuth: the link is him acknowledging someone else solved one of his open problems with Claude. Quote: "It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days."

- Linus Torvalds: used it to write a tool in Python because "I know more about analog filters—and that’s not saying much—than I do about python" and he doesn't care to learn. He's using it as a copy-paste replacement, not to write the kernel.

- John Carmack: he's literally just opining on what he thinks will happen in the future.

You are overstating those sources. That alone makes me doubt that you're engaging in this discussion in good faith.

I read them all, and in none of them do any of the three say that they "regularly use LLMs for development".

Carmack is speculating about how the technology will develop. And Carmack has a vested interest in AI, so I would not put any value on this as an "engineers opinion".

Torvalds has vibe coded one visualizer for a hobby project. That's within what I might use to test out LLM output: simple, inconsequential, contained. There's no indication in that article that Linus is using LLMs for any serious development work.

Knuth is reporting about somebody else using LLMs for mathematical proofs. The domain of mathematical proofs is much more suitable for LLM work, because the LLM can be guided by checking the correctness of proofs.

And Knuth himself only used the partial proof sent in by someone else as inspiration for a handcrafted proof.

I don't mind arguing this case with you, but please don't fabricate facts. That's dishonest

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