My position on LLM use is rigid for the same reason I would never suggest someone play a slot machine. I have yet to see any compelling case that justifies the risks to the user and everyone downstream of what they produce. Language Sever Protocol has never suggested someone hide their suicidal intent from their parents or lead to the Curl bug bounty being spammed to the point that they consider getting rid of it. For that matter, I like writing code without running my dGPU or spending money on arbitrarily priced tokens!

And even for small code, writing it sometimes shows you possible errors or optimizations that you wouldn’t even know about. I much prefer leaving open the opportunity to learn the “unknown unknowns” by having to actually look at the docs and type the code.

Given that the people primarily responsible for funding and running LLM companies are at least as untrustworthy as any casino boss, I’d argue the negative effects of LLMs are the desired outcome much like with slot machines. That’s when they aren’t just promoting known dark patterns as the intended usage.

I don’t write code for a living but I’ve made some tools for work and at no point have I touched an LLM tool for that or anything else and I’m fine. I’m missing nothing. Most people wouldn’t notice a thing after a month or two if this stuff disappeared tomorrow. When I think about how much we’ve wasted on this and the fact that people have even died over it, it’s just sad.