>> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it.

If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.

This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks - they tell us about LLMs and also tell us they don't use them.

"That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right."

> If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.

What about the people who do have a lot of LLM experience and agree with OP?

> That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right.

If someone claims to be able to fly by strapping bird wing shaped pieces of plywood with feathers glued on to their arms, do you need to personally jump off a tower with them to say they don't work, or can you look at the results of others attempting it and draw conclusions based on that? LLM proponents are making claims about their capabilities which can relatively easily be checked without using LLMs yourself. To pick an example where LLM proponents are correct, anyone who says LLMs can't generate syntactically valid code can be proven wrong fairly easily by producing an example of syntactically valid, LLM generated code.

Further, if you read the rest of the paragraph you responded to, it's clear that this claim is about the state of the industry as a whole. "Software has not improved in quality, got faster, become cheaper to produce (when you exclude the mountain of poor-quality demoware that no reputable organisation would touch with a barge pole), or become more capable." Whether this is true or not is something that can be evaluated without ever having prompted yourself, or even arguably without being a developer at all.

> This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks

(BTW, I am the OP: I posted this, but I didn't write the article.)

No, the real problem here is that you do not understand the anti-LLM arguments.

I won't touch LLMs for anything except translation. But my anti-LLM stance is nothing whatsoever to do with whether they work or not (and that is even without the extreme torturing of the word "work" that the advocates do.)

My objection is based on the terrible crimes committed in building them (from theft), training them (at catastrophic ecological cost), in running them (ditto), in the effects on their individual users (cumulative brain damage), on their corporate users (economic destruction), and so on.

If they work is incidental. The believers like what LLMs do. For me, by my definitions, LLMs do not work. They extrude content that I never ever want to see, or read, or here, or want to execute. But for the botlickers, that is enough: they extrude a product. The botlickers want product.

I don't care. I don't want the product, but more to the point, I want the machines making the product not to exist... and if the price of that is all the people using the machines to never work again, and all the companies using them to go bankrupt, I would be absolutely delighted.

> If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.

Unlike the author, I'm an LLM optimist; but this take doesn't make sense to me. The thing you show cannot be "hey look at this LLM-based workflow, that's so much better than last year".

Where is the big browser, operating system, or other piece of work that has been able to quickly compete with the existing entries in the market due to LLMs?

The only one that I can think of off the top of my head is the rewrite of Bun in Rust. I think the fact that Claude Code runs on millions of devices on top of that rewrite is the sort of impressive demonstration that would prove that LLMs have lasting, systemic effects -- but it is telling that the only one I can think of was made by the extremely well funded lab that also happens to build the LLM.

> If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.

I have. Which is how I know that such statements are correct.

And when you show them evidence of the incredible things that can be done they stick their fingers in their ears and say "I'm not listening. I'm not listening. looping ad infinitum. OR they start saying "Oh yeah, prove it with hard numbers." when nothing about software productivity has ever been able to be proven with hard numbers. It becomes a semantic word game that you cannot win because nothing you say will get them to believe because they don't want to believe. The LLM haters are the most dogmatic of unbelievers.

Which I find weird - the greatest fun for me is making a computer do something awesome. I learned to program because I want that outcome.

I respect if you love the art and craft of hand programming but it's something else entirely to simply deny that LLM's are what they are - which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year.

If you're a hand programmer forever then fine, just don't make a fool of yourself by saying that everyone is lying about LLMs, to justify your choices.

I see this pattern in a lot of things.

- people who preach against PV solar... while people I actually know broke even 10 or more years ago and have been happily getting "free power" for a lot of their needs

- people who preach against electric cars... while people I actually know are driving them with no "range anxiety" or "replaced main batteries", but their non-engineer spouse/kids are driving the cars fine too.

- people who preach that tesla self driving isn't viable/etc... while lots of people are using tesla to drive themselves around for > 90% of their driving