Anti-LLM Sentiment Considered Harmful

hasufell: > I’ve also heard about people who claim it actually reinvigorated their excitement for coding (I’m guessing because they can potentially delegate all the stuff they don’t find interesting to the agents). That would be me. I enjoy coding so much more with agents. It might be more me than best-practice but agents are so much better at repository maintenance than I am. With a good checklist and a fresh LLM, my libraries are much cleaner than they used to be and easier, more streamlined. The costs of maintaining a library with proper CI, doctests, examples and design narrative has gone way. Observationally, LLMs feel like all of our readme’s come to life (good, bad, ugly or non-existent) and their is a renaissance in literate programming - LLM’s care as much about good docs as good code. I’m in the middle of developing a new library and I’m very interested in how an agent uses it out of the box. If they write bad code or stuff it up it’s usually the library design at fault and not some hallicinating retch at the end of a tool call. A bad LLM should be able to write good code with your library - it might be that type of world going forward. Often, I experience LLMs writing good code at speed. Better code than I can write by myself and more code than I could ever write. Out of the box, they know much more category theory than I ever will, which I’m finding invaluable in library design. I think you’re wrong in the basic premise that LLMs are always harmful to code with. Agents love using Haskell - they can reason away and bounce off of type guardrails and get a compile eventually (just like us!). They help cover gaps in the ecosystem, make documentation cheap and cheerful and they write nice Haskell if you train them properly. I realize there is a wall of pain heading our way in terms of LLMs and infrastructure, but that’s a global tech problem not confined to our little community. So i enjoy using LLMs and especially for the interesting stuff, but I totally get why we should be freaking out over the likely effects on infrastructure.