My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

Summary

Image by Annie Ruygt A heartfelt provocation about AI-assisted programming. Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from. Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluctant to push back on them, because, well, they’re smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious, and worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite. All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career. Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine. Bona fides: I’ve been shipping software since the mid-1990s. I started out in boxed, shrink-wrap C code. Survived an ill-advised Alexandrescu C++ phase. Lots of Ruby and Python tooling. Some kernel work. A whole lot of server-side C, Go, and Rust. However you define “serious developer”, I qualify. Even if only on one of your lower tiers. level setting† (or, God forbid, 2 years ago with Copilot) First, we need to get on the same page. If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. They also: pull in arbitrary code from the tree, or from other trees online, into their context windows, run standard Unix tools to navigate the tree and extract information, interact with Git, run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP. The code in an agent th...