The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live (maybe Antirez a bit less, but they're still not mean about it).

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ymyms 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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SchemaLoad 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's weird how some people seem to treat using an LLM as part of their personality in a borderline cult like way. So someone saying they don't use it or don't find it useful triggers an anger response in them.

	▲	_kb 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is not novel - see language/framework choice, OS (or even distro) preferences, editor wars, indentation. People develop strong opinions about tools, technology, and techniques regardless of domain. LLM maximalists just have the unfortunate capability to generate infinite content about their specific shiny thing.

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vunderba 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This. For every absurd LLM cheerleader, there’s a corresponding LLM minimalist who trots out the “stochastic parrot” line at every possible occasion along with the fact that they do CrossFit and don’t own a TV.

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CjHuber 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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LAC-Tech 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	InfamousRece 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In my case I don’t even mind if these evangelists try so hard to convince other developers. What I do mind is that they seem to be quite successful in convincing our bosses. So we get things like mandatory LLM usage, minimum number of Claude API calls per day, every commit must be co-authored by Claude, etc.