Using LLMs at Oxide

A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line:

> it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open.

I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they should approach LLM use.

Bryan has 30+ years of challenging software (and now hardware) engineering experience. He memorably said that he's worked on and completed a "hard program" (an OS), which he defines as a program you doubt you can actually get working.

The way Bryan approaches an LLM is super different to how a 2025 junior engineer does so. That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.

> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.

This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction.

When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast.

There was this long argument that you should know things and not have to look it up all the time. Altavista was a joke, and Google was cheating.

Then syntax highlighting came around and there'd always be a guy going "yeah nah, you shouldn't need syntax highlighting to program, you screen looks like a Christmas tree".

Then we got stuff like auto-complete, and it was amazing, the amount of keystrokes we saved. That too, was seen as heresy by the purists (followed later by LSP - which many today call heresy).

That reminds me also, back in the day, people would have entire Encyclopaedia on DVDs collections. Did they use it? No. But they criticised Wikipedia for being inferior. Look at today, though.

Same thing with LLMs. Whether you use them as a powerful context based auto-complete, as a research tool faster than wikipedia and google, as rubber-duck debugger, or as a text generator -- who cares: this is today, stop talking like a fossil.

It's 2025 and junior developers can't work without LSP and LLM? It's fine. They're not in front of a 386 DX33 with 1 book of K&R C and a blue EDIT screen. They have massive challenged ahead of them, the IT world is complete shambles, and it's impossible to decipher how anything is made, even open source.

Today is today. Use all the tools at hand. Don't shame kids for using the best tools.

We should be talking about sustainability of such tools rather than what it means to use them (cf. enshittification, open source models etc.)

It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey.

Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to <social media, Steam, consoles, and other distractions> of today.

The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today.

LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming nature of LLMs that might be the problem. Back in the day, if you had, say a library access, the problem was knowing what to look for. Discoverability with LLMs is exponential.

As for LLM as auto-complete, there is an argument to be made that typing a lot reinforces knowledge in the human brain like writing. This is getting lost, but with productivity gains.

Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one.

Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing causing a lack of memory formation

A rule I set myself a long time ago was to never copy paste code from stack overflow or similar websites. I always typed it out again. Slower, but I swear it built the comprehension I have today.