My gut says that is not a property of LLM evangelists, but a property of current internet culture in general. People with strong, divisive, and engaging opinions seem to do well (by some definition of well) online.

I think the actual problem is everyone tries to assert how capable or not coding agents currently are, but how useful they are depends so much on what you are trying to get them to do and also on your communication with the model. And often its hard to tell whether you're just prompting it wrong or if they're incapable of doing it.

By now we at least agree that stochastical parrots can be useful. It would be nice if the debate now was less polarized so we could focus on what makes them work better for some and worse for others other than just expectations.

Thanks for clarifying for people.

And yeah, as I laid out in the article (that of course, very few people actually read, even though it was short...), I really don't mind how people make code. It's those that try so hard to convince the rest of us I find very suspect.

You are right, I went a bit too quickly so let me expand a bit my chain of thoughts.

The article is against the set of LLM evangelists who are hostile towards the skeptics.

I 100% agree with the part that basically says fuck you to them.

However, explaining the hostile part with there being the feeling of insecurity (which is plausible but would need evidence) is not fully convincing and it seems dangerous to accept this conclusion and stop looking for the actual reasons this quickly.

And the fact that there are actually good programmers persuaded that LLMs help them weakens the "insecurity" argument quite a bit, at least as the only explanation.

As someone currently pretty much hostile to LLMs, I'm quite interested in what's currently at play but I'm suspicious of claims that initially feel good but are not strongly backed.

Like, if these hostile people were actually shills, we would want to know this and not have closed the eyes too early because of some explanation that felt good, right? Or any actual reason.

Look into the Motte-and-bailey fallacy. That set seriously doesn't exist. Even the people on youtube doing "vibe coding" benchmarks mostly say it's crap. (Well they probably exist on twitter/linkedin.)

This article just functions as flamebait for people who use LLMs to implement whole features to argue the semantics of "vibe coding". All while everyone is ignoring the writing on the wall. That we will soon have boxes going through billions of tokens every second. At that point slopcoding WILL be productive, but only if you build up the skill to differentiate yourself from the top 10% of prompters.