LLM Inevitabilism

LLM is an almost complete waste of time. Advocates of LLM are not accurately measuring their time and productivity, and comparing that to LLM-free alternative approaches.

Indeed, I keep seeing comments stating that LLMs have completely changed their way of programming or even changed their lives. All I can think is, they must have been pretty bad at programming for the impact to be that dramatic.

I keep seeing people making this point as well. But like... yeah? Isn't that the whole idea, that it lets you write programs even if you're not very good at it? I'm a mediocre programmer and LLMs have certainly been useful for me. Not sure what future I or others in my boat have in the job market a few years down the road, though.

And never back it up with hard data on productivity and defect rate before and after.

Well, studies keep showing that using LLMs like that switches your brain off in an alarmingly short amount of time, possibly permanently, turning you into a mindless automaton intermediating between other people and your computer, and also makes you take longer to do things while thinking you're taking less time.

LLMs completely change the way people do things, in the same way that methamphetamine addictions completely change the way people do things.

Well, we have at least one bit of data now: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Take a quick look at that summary graph. Then read the X axis labels, and laugh, and weep.

LLMs are literally basically cocaine addiction: delivering the feeling of competence and success directly to your brain, while all actual real-world evidence points to the opposite. They also actually work for some purposes, of course.

Developers will discount the time they spent formulating prompts, and criticailly evaluating the results, because those activities don't feel like development.

It's like if you nag a kid into cleaning their room, and give them detailed instructions on what to do next once they begin the activity, you might underestimate the time you spent, focusing only on the actual clean up time executed by the kid.

Part of the reason may be that the interactions are not recorded. The record of development consists of deliverables like source code, bug reports and documentation. Interactions with AI are gone, just like editor keystrokes.