People like to talk about code as craft and art but the vast majority of the code that was written has always been mediocre at best. LLMs already beat it.
A focused experienced skilled programmer can do better but the market niche for that kind of code is actually small. Most commercial code just has to be good enough to accomplish a business need.
The more pertinent question in my mind is.. why does it still matter? Your customers don’t care about elegant code, they care about working products. There is some relation to good code and good customer experience e.g in terms of performance, but in general your customers won’t feel the impact from poor code. That assumes both pieces of code are functional though, and you do need to babysit LLMs to make sure it actually remains functional.
The problem with this view is that in the scale of LLM progress, this is essentially accurate understanding of archaic models. Modern models are not trained to program using human generated code. They are trained in agentic harnesses where they are able to access real computing environments, and they are rewarded for completing tasks within that environment. This is in contrast the being rewarded for the most likely next token, which used to create essentially an average of human output like you say. Modern training frameworks are able to comfortably produce models that perform well above the center of the bell curve.
No, they don't care about nice code, but they do care about code that actually works. In my experience, there is a correlation between code that has been thought out correctly and code that hasn't, in terms of security, safety, compliance, data-safety, performance, etc. And so far, all LLM-produced code I've seen is severely lacking.
> That assumes both pieces of code are functional though, and you do need to babysit LLMs to make sure it actually remains functional.
So, I guess we agree on that :)
At this point I think the only reason someone would do better without an LLM is an unwillingness to use it effectively. Even if you’re going to write all code by hand and only use an agent for validation and debugging, that’s a significant boost.
I hear this being repeated, but every time I've asked a LLM to come up with code without proper supervision, the result only superficially looked correct, but didn't stand up to scrutiny.
I wonder why our experiences differ.
If you really are on the winning/right/good side of this debate, then just be in it, you don't need to sweat it all so much. We have all heard what you or anyone else are going to say on the matter, trust me.
Why care at this point? Why even give the conversation any air by going and responding with the same lines over and over? Is it really just too much to y'all still that some guy has the wrong opinion on the internet?
Really, good luck to you.
The optimists have been more correct in predicting the capabilities and usefulness of LLMs.
The pessimists seem to have a hard time rationalizing what they thought with what’s actually happening.
I’m happy to engage in discourse on the impact and risks to environment, society, jobs, mental health, etc. There’s plenty of room for thoughtful exploration there.
The one thing I have no patience for is that LLMs produce nothing of value or have no technical worth.
The recent efficiency gains in AI have been unparalleled in the history of computing as far as I know. We often point at how a single computer used to occupy an entire room, and over the course of decades of progress, are now wildly surpassed by computers that fit in our pocket. Inference of frontier language models that used to occupy entire data centers earlier this year (Claude Opus 4.6) are now comfortably surpassed in capability by models that can run on a single high end consumer grade gaming PC. I predict data center construction will collapse not just due to pushback from people who hate them, but also lack of demand from people who actually do use AI. People who like AI tend to like running their AI at home, and now they can.
The most important risks in AI right now are the social ones you mentioned. How does the economy evolve? How do we take advantage of this to maximize joy and love? Perhaps most importantly: how do we avoid (incentivize against) falling into a techno-dictatorship?
I have to keep reminding myself though, many of those pessimists are people “getting paid to not understand” as the saying goes.
It took 30 seconds with that Davinci model to predict where we are today, where we’ll be next year, and the eventual destruction if not outright extinction of humanity as we know it. Maybe the future is so grim many are simply in the denial stage still.
So what has an "LLM" truly improved in your life outside of simplistic automations/code generation/textual work? It's definitely not improved support. The only support interaction that I've noted to be somewhat better was one (of a few) with Amazon where the bot was able to refund a purchase without talking to a real person. But even then it was a case wherein a human would have probably done it just as quick. Is there a win there? Sure: for Amazon but it didn't "delight" me. And a chatbot is the lowest of low hanging fruit all the "optimists" claim an LLM can do so much better than humans or deterministic code.
How would you say LLMs are impacting the markets? Do you think they're useful to the economy thus far? Or are you looking at the spend of a small fraction of companies that could cause a broader recession when the cyclical funding dries up? If you're going to go to open weight models - well those don't appear out of thin air. Is your focus on the win/loss truly that myopic?
Again, your statement seems absurd to me. I think most people can agree there are useful modalities with LLMs. But it's always at a cost and I, like the author of the article, don't think that LLMs are as universally useful as many "optimists" believe. But to say that the pessimists can't actually rationalize their thoughts, when you provide none of your own, is truly foot in mouth garbage.
And just to be clear, I think LLMs will be a net negative on society.
And then there are LLM realists ( Read realpolitik: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger ).
I hate LLMs to the bone and am a master at "people not using the technology can change their behavior to neutralize the impact of the technology". Coupled with an 150+ IQ, I can tell you this technology won't go away. Cynically and pragmatically I use and will use it to the maximum extent of enslaving and eliminating the drone of drones who worship it. Go ahead, replace your mediocrity and lack of critical thinking with something that surely won't spit you out in a ditch a few years from now!