alt Hacker NewsThis doesn't feel completely right.
Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe.
I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this.
edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon and Antirez are part of the hostile LLM evangelists the article criticizes. Although the article does generalize to all LLM evangelists at least in some parts and Simon did react to this here. For these reasons, I haven't ruled him out as a target of this article, at least partly.
Replies
You seem to be mistaking set and members here. The piece's critique is against the set (LLM Evangelists), not against specific members of the set (the ones you mentioned). One can agree with the point of the piece while still acknowledging there are good programmers who are also LLM evangelists.
I don't think it's fair to compare people who are already seemingly at the peak of their career, a place to which they got by building skill in coding. And in fact what they have now that's valuable isn't mostly skill but capital. They've built famous software that's widely used.
Also they didn't adopt the your-career-is-ruined-if-you-don't-get-on-board tone that is sickeningly pervasive on LinkedIn. If you believe that advice and give up on being someone who understands code, you sure aren't gonna write Redis or Django.
I suspect for truly talented people, they just like talking to LLMs. And they're also not 100% focused on programming anymore, so the async nature of it matters more than it does to people who write code full time for a living.
> They are probably better than most of us
most top engineers will have their best work locked up in their employer's private repositories
simonw and antirez have an advantage here, and at least the former is very good at self-promotion
The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live (maybe Antirez a bit less, but they're still not mean about it).