You don't need to use LLMs for coding to stay "competitive" with your colleagues.

I work for a FAANG, we have unlimited AI credits to be used on any model we want, with basically any tooling we want.

My whole team massively uses AI, I barely do. I use not even 10% of the tokens that they do. Yet I have not only the highest rate of PRs raised, but also the highest rate of PRs I reviewed, and the second lowest number of revisions per PR.

AI is all about fake productivity. You feel productive while you're achieving the same, if not less (or even often, nothing at all).

Long term it's pretty obvious that people heavily using AI will become a lot less productive, if not simply unable to work as software engineers. My colleagues are already scared.

In fact, as a challenge to anyone who says they "haven't written a line of code by hand in X amount of time", go do a test. Try to write any code without any LLM use for just 30 minutes.

Very well-written, and undeniably relatable! Sadly, I am compelled by forces beyond my cognitive control to respond, especially to points I've seen and refuted before. If nothing else, I hope it's helpful to know the other side of these things :)

  using LLMs in my codings

I hope it's not too combative to start by saying this is a huge red flag for someone who hasn't checked in on what post-Mythos agentic engineering is like. Of course LLMs are undeniably involved, but it comes off like someone quitting social media by decrying protocols (or worse: series of tubes). LLMs are an essential component that has finally thawed the AI Winter, yes, but they're still just parts of a system. A harness is far from a mere wrapper around a neural network, to say the least.

  people argue that "LLMs are just a tool", but really, it is not, it is a SERVICE

That dichotomy is a false one (many software tools are productionized as services), but the underlying sentiment is clear and common: that querying a chatbot is akin to asking another human to do something for you. This comes up most often in Reddit's vicious "AI wars" about digital art, where generating an image cannot be a creative act on the users' part because it's more like comissioning a painter than it is like painting.

I think the response is obvious (and why this is merely an aside rather than a "dealbreaker" proper): this is granting personhood to neural networks, which no one who supports this point would admit to in a thousand years. Either they're people and you're asking a person to think/paint for you, or they're inanimate machines and it's a tool; there is no middle ground. (If unconvinced: what about a camera makes it a tool to be used rather than a peer to be delegated to? It can draw a picture in milliseconds!)

  the current hype and craze for them

This is an underlying worlview thing that poisons the rest of the analysis, namely that nothing (important) ever happens. That surely this just a hype moment that will pass like the iPhone moment and the Bitcoin moment, and that anyone who says otherwise is surely crazy. It's begging the whole discussion.

  And it's no wonder, there have been several studies confirming this:

The first paper is Microsoft's[1] recent incredibly informal survey of how people feel working in a career they know to be changing beyond their recognition, and with tools that didn't really exist 6 months ago. Yes, orchestrating agents is a different experience than we're used to; no, a simple survey could never prove that they are cognitively dangerous.

The second paper is notoriously misleading, and a stain upon MIT -- observing brain activity differences between people who have to think deeply and write an essay by hand and people who type a sentence and then sit there until the allotted time is over is not surprising, and definitely doesn't show what they clearly intended the flashy graphics and suggestive conclusion to show (that using chatbots leads to brain damage). There's more, but long story short: they're manipulating valid techniques to make a tool seem like a uniquely-dangerous toxin, when the exact same effect applies to all previous tools of note (calculators, typewriters, word processors, translators, even Grammarly).

The third paper is just highly-speculative, deeply-polemic schlock, obviously.

  The quality of the output is not that great

1. This is an unfalsifiable claim, which is lucky because the goalposts have had to be moved many times to get to "looks impressive, but is sometimes complete bullshit". Turing refutes this thinking quite directly in `§6.5` of Computing Machinery and Intelligence (CMaI)[2].

2. Many experienced engineers disagree, to say the least, as do companies investing billions.

3. Again, you can't help but sense the author hasn't used post-Mythos models; even if they have, the fact that such a huge leap has occured in just the previous 24 months is overwhelming evidence against this notion. The linked sources being A) an /r/AntiAI post (!) and B) a pre-Mythos essay don't help.

  Congratulations, you have let OpenAI/Anthropic/Elon Musk dictate what your code does and why.

I'm quickly getting the sense that the author is too vitriolic and dug in to be reasoned out of these views :( Hopefully it goes without saying that "your code sucks because you gave it to [HATED_FIGURE]!" is an invective, not a premise. For the rest: see previously preceeding section, which is indeed "closely related".

  I like writing code

Same! I also like playing video games and tending to plants -- just had a blast on Beyond All Reason last night, and my Philodendron Florida Ghost just unfurled a wonderfully-ghostly new leaf. Neither are my career.

  Environmental aspect

I'm most dissapointed by this part, as this person is Finnish and should know better about the Google story :( What's being framed as some unheard-of act of environmental terror is really just the planned and almost-completely-permitted early harvest of a small plot of "planted forest", i.e. a tree farm, which are one of Finland's main industries. Everything in this map in blue is tree farms, with the Muhos site in the middle: https://i.imgur.com/HyTVp1I.jpeg [3]

The preceeding 'this technology uses power' point doesn't need refutation, but it underlines the problem with the point above: this is post-hoc reasoning. Cutting down a tree farm in Finland is so, so far down the list of priorities for actual environmental activism that it's hard to describe, and yet this post has nothing about not working for companies that serve non-vegan meals for lunch, uses air conditioning, or flies people to yearly retreats.

  But I just personally feel squeamish about having my work being done by rather skeezy companies

Even if this were relevant (which it's not in a post-GLM-5.3 world[3]) it offers no argument, and thus cannot support the conclusion.

  Even if some technology or tool sticks around, it does not necessarily mean its good idea to work with it.

Also not an argument. Heroin isn't inadvisable because it's "here to stay", but rather because it's a toxic, extremely chemically addictive narcotic that kills many thousands of well-intentioned users every year, and ruins thousands more families before that.

TL;DR: Apologies to the (again, clear & well-intentioned) author, but this essay is like heroin -- I dislike it!

---

[1]: BTW, there's a reason Microsoft published this, and it's the opposite bias that this author assumed. Read this article and see how deep the conflict of interest admission is buried -- it says it all: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/anthropic-training...

[2]: pp. 12 of https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...

[3]: That tool, more info, definitive Finnish zoning documents available at this ChatGPT link (ew, I know, I agree!): https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6af081bc590881919c7231419db48a72

[4]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

The comparison with heroin frankly is bizarre, as if using LLMs was purely hedonistic activity.

LLMs are tools like motor vehicles. They allow you to get somewhere, quickly but brutishly. You won't be able to appreciate the beautiful scenery much, as it rushes by. You're going to have to compensate for the exercise you would have gotten, had you walked, or it's going to be unhealthy. It's undeniably bad for the environment (electric or not) and has other negative externalities. The politics of many of the countries supplying most motor vehicle fuel to the world are beyond fascist by modern leftist standards. Yet, we depend on them, we have constructed a lot of the infrastructure we need to live around their existence, and even if every city became walkable over night, the last mile for most transport would be covered by some motor vehicle. There are many "what ifs" surrounding motor vehicles where the answer boils down to: "Well, then we're fucked". But we're not fucked today, and so on it goes.

Of course you can try not to partake in motor vehicles, and insofar as you don't make a moral grandstand about it, that's totally fine with me. But the rest of the world is in it for the ride. The first cars weren't very good either.

I agree with most points made by the author, however the cognitive impact depends on how you use LLMs. Here's an example: I build so many Phoenix / Elixir applications and one of the things I really hate is the amount of boilerplate code I need to write for every project. It is exactly the same (eg. Setting up vite, removing existing mix based node integrations) and modifying scaffolded code to adhere to my design. I already know CSS inside out and Tailwind CSS too. So, by offloading the task of rewiring existing scaffolded CRUD templates, I would argue the opposite - I am saving precious cognitive load from doing repetitive data entry work.

That's why I have a very clear personal policy of always being the architect and instructing LLMs what AND how a task must be done as opposed to blindly just trusting them with everything - that is how you lose your ability to think.

[dead]

Maybe an LLM would help him avoid the 418 error I am getting?

This sounds like, “I’m not going to buy any food at the store at all; I’m going to toil the soil for any nutrient I put in my mouth.”

Cool story bro, but it sounds like you are trying to convince yourself.

See you back here in a month, or so.