My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
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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.
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 that actually "does stuff" with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It's surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is. You could write an effective coding agent in a weekend.
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you'll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you'll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don't get tired; they're immune to inertia.
You've always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code.
If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down. Agents lint. They compile and run tests. If their LLM invents a new function signature, the agent sees the error. They feed it back to the LLM, which says "oh, right, I totally made that up" and then tries again.
Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that's what Cursor.ai costs. Part of being a senior developer is making less-able coders productive, be they fleshly or algebraic.
I work mostly in Go. I'm confident the designers of the Go programming language didn't set out to produce the most LLM-legible language in the industry. They succeeded nonetheless. Go has just enough type safety, an extensive standard library, and a culture that prizes (often repetitive) idiom. LLMs kick ass generating it.
Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed.
LLMs really might displace many software developers. That's not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech's line of fire as everybody else's have been for the last 3 decades.
But something real is happening. My smartest friends are blowing it off. Maybe I persuade you. Probably I don't. But we need to be done making space for bad arguments.