I’m a systems architect who uses agentic coding to get around some executive dysfunction challenges with writing my own code. I learned about the dysfunction late in life; maybe meds will eventually get me to a point where I can consistently work on a personal code project without a looming deadline or social contract in the loop. For now I am part of the problem. Hi!

I look at agentic coding as a firearms problem:

• it lowers the barrier to execution: anyone with sloppy aim can point and pull the trigger, and do a lot of harm in the process
• both perform better in the hands of people with discipline and experience, but that doesn’t change the fact that LLMs and guns have massively proliferated and any idiot can get their hands on one (or that shitty people benefit from mass producing them)
• the industrial complex producing guns profits from murder, and the industrial complex producing datacenters profit from murder of the environment and attempts to eliminate jobs
• the same countries who treat gun control as an anathema tend to view “AI” controls as an anathema
• analogies suck, they’re never perfect but they get the conversation started

That said, most of the people who hate LLMs also don’t know a damn thing about how they’re used correctly. It’s also not their fault. Sure, they’re under no obligation to be an expert about the thing that’s harming them. But there’s a bigger reason: the companies pushing this shit benefit from a world stage where people use them wastefully and inefficiently.

The short list of things most people don’t get:

I could add another ten bullet points here, but I’m not here to prove that LLMs are capable of being useful. I’m here to demonstrate that it requires knowledge of a problem domain to get the best results. That means you can’t get rid of employees familiar with the knowledge domain. You need senior employees to get the best results, and you need junior employees so that they can eventually become senior employees. Same as it ever was. But because we’ve got useless fucking politicians who are too busy lining their own pockets instead of, I don’t know, regulating a worldwide memory shortage caused by a handful of companies, the whole thing is cannibalization of human society all the way down.

We could have scaled this to operate in the consumer space at a fraction of the energy costs (Apple SOC style versus energy inefficient hyperscaling) and used it as something to generate value by augmenting the capabilities of individual workers instead of trying to replace them wholesale. It only makes sense that it should have benefitted everyone considering this tech was built on shoving libraries worth of human achievement into a training pipeline (often without permission), right?

Nah. They profit more if we don’t own our own compute and everyone is encouraged to burn energy on treating the LLMs like all-knowing oracles instead of research tooling. They control the access to creations built on stolen knowledge. But hey, if everything else gets burned down in the process at least they come out on the other side rich and bailed out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)

A black company (ブラック企業/ブラック会社, burakku kigyō/burakku gaisha), also referred to in English as a black corporation or black business, is a Japanese term for a company that is exploitative or abusive towards its workers.

(snip)

While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, a typical practice at a black company is to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. Conditions are poor, and workers are subjected to verbal abuse and “power harassment” (bullying) by their superiors. In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies would often threaten young employees with disrepute if they chose to quit.

You did not address the core issue, which is that you engage with many comment threads negatively and on an individual basis, providing a cyclical viewpoint. This is creating engagement for each “toxic” thread individually instead of confidently asserting a PoV and letting it rest. I understand that from your perspective that it’s fair to lower yourself to their perceived level, but it’s still bloating the toxic side of the discourse instead of helping it move on.

Drop a wall of well reasoned text and let it stand on its own. Or provide the type of comment that you want to see at the top level and be the change you want.

Case in point, I’ve said what I wanted to say, have found myself restating it once, and this comment is my peace out. A good day to you!

Then make a top level comment that kicks off the type of discussion you want.

For all your comments, not a single one was a reply to the post itself. Lots of comments presenting your POV (totally fair), others that call the contributions of others noise because you think their POV is low value and over represented.

Your posting style may come from a good place, but it’s very adjacent to sealioning. Be the change that you want to see, not a comment warrior creating engagement in every comment thread where someone on the internet is wrong.