A Gun to Your Head

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:35:25 -0700

We Live in a Society

While I think I’ve made my position on voluntarily using LLMs for software engineering pretty clear, I realize that not everyone has the luxury of choice in our current corporate environment. In fact, I’m in that boat myself, with management breathing down my neck to show some sort of participation in the LLM craze.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how someone whose career may be tied to an AI mandate outside their control can survive the current era without totally compromising their values.

LLMs Are Bad at Software

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:27:41 -0700

I am incredibly tired of “reasonable” takes about LLMs being used to develop software. “Well, they’re useful for-” No! They’re unethical plagiarism machines that exploit some of our worst addictive impulses while being trained to flatter us so we’ll spend more time and money on an ecologically destructive and inefficient method of approximating text sequences. They are insidious and I’m going to lay out how they screw up your coding and your critical thinking in all sorts of ways.

LLMs on Briar Patch

A Gun to Your Head

We Live in a Society

LLMs Are Bad at Software