alt Hacker NewsA measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line:
> it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open.
I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they should approach LLM use.
Bryan has 30+ years of challenging software (and now hardware) engineering experience. He memorably said that he's worked on and completed a "hard program" (an OS), which he defines as a program you doubt you can actually get working.
The way Bryan approaches an LLM is super different to how a 2025 junior engineer does so. That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.
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I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad.
It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.
The craft vs practical tension with LLMs is interesting. We've found LLMs excel when there's a clear validation mechanism - for security research, the POC either works or it doesn't. The LLM can iterate rapidly because success is unambiguous.
Where it struggles: problems requiring taste or judgment without clear right answers. The LLM wants to satisfy you, which works great for 'make this exploit work' but less great for 'is this the right architectural approach?'
The craftsman answer might be: use LLMs for the systematic/tedious parts (code generation, pattern matching, boilerplate) while keeping human judgment for the parts that matter. Let the tool handle what it's good at, you handle what requires actual thinking.
For the other non-native speakers wondering, "fly" means your trouser zipper.
He surely has his fly closed when cutting through the hype with reflection and pragmatism (without the extreme positions on both sides often seen).
I found it funny that in a sentence that mentions "those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals", a few words later, there's an em-dash. I've often used em-dashes myself, so I find it a bit annoying that use of em-dashes is widely considered to be an AI tell.
> The way Bryan approaches an LLM is super different to how a 2025 junior engineer does so
This is a key difference. I've been writing software professionally for over two decades. It took me quite a long time to overcome certain invisible (to me) hesitations and objections to using LLMs in sdev workflows. At some point the realization came to me that this is simply the new way of doing things, and from this point onward, these tools will be deeply embedded in and synonymous with programming work. Recognizing this phenomenon for what it is somehow made me feel young again -- perhaps that's just the crust breaking around a calcified grump, but I do appreciate being able to tap into that all the same.
It's funny that I've seen people both argue that LLMs are exclusively useful only to beginners who know next to nothing and also that they are only useful if you are a 50+ YoE veteran at the top of their craft who started programming with punch cards since they were 5-years-old.
I wonder which of these camps are right.
Interesting tension between craft and speed with LLMs. I've been building with AI assistance for the past week (terminal clients, automation infrastructure) and found the key is: use AI for scaffolding and boilerplate, but hand-refine anything customer-facing or complex. The 'intellectual fly open' problem is real when you just ship AI output directly. But AI + human refinement can actually enable better craft by handling the tedious parts. Not either/or, but knowing which parts deserve human attention vs which can be delegated.
> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.
This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction.
When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast.
There was this long argument that you should know things and not have to look it up all the time. Altavista was a joke, and Google was cheating.
Then syntax highlighting came around and there'd always be a guy going "yeah nah, you shouldn't need syntax highlighting to program, you screen looks like a Christmas tree".
Then we got stuff like auto-complete, and it was amazing, the amount of keystrokes we saved. That too, was seen as heresy by the purists (followed later by LSP - which many today call heresy).
That reminds me also, back in the day, people would have entire Encyclopaedia on DVDs collections. Did they use it? No. But they criticised Wikipedia for being inferior. Look at today, though.
Same thing with LLMs. Whether you use them as a powerful context based auto-complete, as a research tool faster than wikipedia and google, as rubber-duck debugger, or as a text generator -- who cares: this is today, stop talking like a fossil.
It's 2025 and junior developers can't work without LSP and LLM? It's fine. They're not in front of a 386 DX33 with 1 book of K&R C and a blue EDIT screen. They have massive challenged ahead of them, the IT world is complete shambles, and it's impossible to decipher how anything is made, even open source.
Today is today. Use all the tools at hand. Don't shame kids for using the best tools.
We should be talking about sustainability of such tools rather than what it means to use them (cf. enshittification, open source models etc.)
> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM.
Years ago I had to spend many months building nothing but Models (as in MVC) for a huge data import / ingest the company I worked on was rewriting. It was just messy enough that it couldn't be automated. I almost lost my mind from the dull monotony and started even having attendance issues. I know today that could have been done with an LLM in minutes. Almost crazy how much time I put into that project compared to if I did it today.