Anti-LLM Sentiment Considered Harmful

If you told anyone 10 years ago what is possible today with LLMs they would not have believed you.

It’s an absolutely marvelous achievement that they can create working code at all. I mean yeah, it is futuristic.

And yet, there’s some bitter aftertaste. And for me it’s mostly:

• people not understanding that they’re probabilistic tools
  • they hallucinate all the time
  • they make subtle errors all the time
  • reviewing slop is hard
• a swath of low-effort one-off vibecode projects that neither have strong visions, nor any particularly good QA
  • someone vibe-coded an operating system and showed it off on reddit, then an actual hardware driver engineer noted that they can include his work when the next linux release is out (and LLMs are trained on it)… legal? Yeah. A bit disrespectful? Also yeah.
• the mechanisms that used to exist in open source are starting to break down (trust relationships between open source maintainers and end users, etc.)
• an insane obsession in industry with productivity , but not with excellence … at times I’m really struggling to maintain motivation and goodwill

Then there’s all the other parts of this: the social impact, the cognitive impact, the political impact, the environmental impact… the greed and scam tactics of big AI corporations.

Some of my lecturer friends are saying universities are in a deep crisis and they don’t know what to do with students cheating and turning in slop and nothing else.

It’s all around us. It’s everywhere. In the news, in every other discussion, in private chats. It’s exhausting.

But what this technology does with our industry as a whole is deeply troubling to me and has made me quite emotional recently. I don’t think open source will continue in the same fashion as it did, that’s for sure. And I’m looking back at ~15 years of open source involvement and how much of my time and energy and focus I invested in all of this. And the future does not look very appealing to me.

Is that the fault of LLMs? Maybe not… it’s largely about how we use them. But it appears it is very challenging to use them in a sensible and responsible way.