Comment by simonw
2 days ago
"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?"
No.
2 days ago
"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?"
No.
I do wonder if C programmers ever asked that of Python devs back in the day.
Back in the day, Python devs commonly were C programmers.
Someone had to do the implementation, after all. And the C API was (and still is) kind of a big deal.
There's a reason the standard library is full of direct ports of C libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic names and APIs. (Of course, it's also full of direct ports of Java libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic architecture.)
This is still a thing today. There have been multiple times I oneshot some project that leadership had been waiting on some team forever to finish, and 90% of it was them refusing to touch a "noob" lang like Python or JS.
Any good engineer can become a good engineer in any language.
Except brainfuck and Haskell.
Still do
No, LLM evangelists will not be willing to admit this in general,
or
no, you, as an LLM evangelist, are not not willing to admit this?
The second.
Ok, then as a self described LLM evangelist, what motivates you to preach about LLM coding instead of just, y'know, doing it in private?
2 replies →
Agreed, but do you honestly think LLMs have reached the level of average programmer? Or is it more a matter of "they can churn out code until I see something that is close enough and I'll make the last few edits"?
Also curious if you publish your working setup or if it changes as fast as the LLMs? Seems like you may have a more stable setup than most given how you are developing tools in the space.
3 replies →
Came here to comment on this line: it completely changes the tone of the article. It's fairly reasonable and neutral until we get here, upon which the antagonism is jarringly clear.
In fact I would posit this is the central crux of the post: OP does not believe those LLM evangelists were ever good programmers.
As others have already noted[1], many well-known excellent programmers - including yourself! and now even Linus! - would beg to differ.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143
Linus doesn't seem like an LLM evangelist: "Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters" at https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/linus_torvalds_vibe_c...
"insecure" in the title didn't set the tone for you?
You can stop questioning yourself early whether you are a good programmer just by realizing you code in python.