Since I understand that LLMs are fundamentally and inherently dishonest, that doesn't leave much wiggle room for me.

Anthropomorphizing them (as many do, but I don't think you are) is a flawed view, but does provide one useful insight.

If one treats an LLM as a person, then the fundamental issue is:

They are a bullshit artist with a huge library. They do not have competence at anything except bullshitting, at which they are superb.

I agree that it's amazing that we can build a mechanical bullshit generator that's good enough to bypass most people's defenses.

But producing code with LLMs - or using them for anything which needs to be correct - is deception (whether you're deceiving yourself or others) on a massive scale, on a par with crypto, Ponzi schemes, climate denial, etc.

(1/2)

Making good software with LLM support is hard work and takes time. If you look at the stuff that people make with three prompts and then post to LinkedIn, you know what I mean.

A good program requires attention to detail, no matter what the tool does for you.

This is to say that code written by LLMs and humans suffer from similar issues, require similar care and review and can fail in similar ways. There is more LLM code, though, and there are new challenges because scaling with LLMs works differently than with humans.

If we'd realised earlier that clients would accept any old shit provided it looked like roughly the right language, we'd all have made a lot more money.

Then: LLMs create code that is comparable to human written code in that frame of reference. There is better code, but there is also much worse.

Finally: LLMs create shitty prose, shitty images and shitty music. I hate all of that.

He's a heavy Claude Code user (multiple sessions in parallel), got fed up that all estimates are about the "median user" or "median query", and benchmarked his own use. He worked out that the energy cost of his CC use is about the same as working on a high-end desktop PC instead of a laptop. It's not even one order of magnitude more.

If you want to convince people you're not just mourning the "loss" of a hobby that's more accessible now than it's ever been, don't try to justify it with climate misinfo.

@hanshuebner @matt I think this article really addresses the disagreement at hand here:

OP's point was that this is not primarily about concern for the craft (like handmade furniture vs factories) but about extremely harmful externalities of using LLMs to extrude code. A big one of which is quality and resulting safety.

Not everyone is working the same way, but it is certainly true that not everyone is a genius. Thus, bad, human code prevails.