Article gains attention on Hacker News
2 Sep 17 9:57 AM · 9d ago · 1 article · 2 posts · 3 sources · development 2 of 2
The article was submitted to Hacker News and Lobsters, accumulating engagement with 71 points and 58 comments on HN within hours of publication.
Martin Fowler Software architect, writer
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1 outlet I Don't Like LLMs
first by HN Frontpage, 9d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 69 · verbatim
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> On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. I really, really object to this framing. Dario Amodei goes particularly hard…
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The difference between working with LLM you don't trust rather than with people you don't trust is that you have no social obligations with LLMs.If you want to work with untrustworthy people, you not only have to double check everything, which may be tolerable but you may also need to do some social gymnastics, as people usually don't like be told…
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I wish that sentiment came through for the guests Martin keeps featuring on his blog.
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To be honest, as a software developer I never recommend handing over ur codebase completely to an autonomous AI agent. There are already instances of AI deleting whole databases. Most of the circuit breakers as of now use another AI to keep a check on your AI agent. That just makes the whole process slower and introduces more hallucination…
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People keep telling me that LLMs are unstoppable now, that they write great code, and that they're dangerous. I can't help but ask, though. Where is this "good" LLM code? I have yet to see LLM output code that I've liked, and while I don't want to offend anyone, I'm starting to suspect that maybe people telling me that LLMs are now good aren't…
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> I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice...They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.If you think the model is "bullshitting you" and is in need of being "called out", odds…
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Agreed on the bad framing here. Relatedly, out of all the real-world harms of LLMs, "I find them mildly annoying to work with" seems an awfully petty one to draw attention to. If Martin Fowler's going to use his sizable platform and influence for LLM criticism, I think he could do better than this.
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For reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority.A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up…
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This is exactly how I feel. I had one guy tell me, “well yea you kind of just have to lower your standards a bit and it’s fine”. I did the slow-blink meme, lol. Really difficult to be looking someone in the eyes and experience them say that in complete seriousness.
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LLM's are information processors. Linters on steroids.Don't talk to them? Maybe that's the issue..treating them like people instead of the text processors that they are.I use LLM's consistently every day and haven't had a "chat" with one in many months. Issue commands and request documents. The whole "thinking machine" role-play makes the tool…
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> As Jessica Kerr put it “not only are they useful, it is irresponsible not to use them…. They’re more thorough, as well as faster.” So much wrong in a single quote. I guess never meet your heroes.
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> I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weaponsThe attitude that AI is doing things all on its own is so pervasive. These are all set off by human operators, giving them instructions and tools to do whatever it is that are doing. The "AI has a mind of its own"…
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Martin: "When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize, treating them as conscious beings with their own will." Also Martin: "[They] also just [make] stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it." Expecting remorse from an LLM when it's wrong strikes me as just as absurd as…
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> we shouldn’t anthropomorphizeAgreed, so why frame it as avoiding unpleasant people? My experience with Anthropic's latest models is that no amount of instruction can overcome their latent verbosity (nor can AGENTS.md overcome OpenAI models' reticence). I tried A/B testing several models and Opus was the clear winner, so I'm not likely to retire…
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This isn't exactly an anti-LLM-usage piece, it's more of a "I don't like their current style of communication" complaint.
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Love the totally conflicting statements in that post.- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than…
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Check out recent entries from martinfowler.com - vibecoding as far as the eye can see
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You appear to be confusing "avoid" with "never interact with".If your professional life has required you to spend enormous amounts of time working very closely with people you don't like and/or don't trust, then -unless it has made you enough money to retire after a few years' work- please accept my condolences.
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Without having a mental model of the code, by actually having written it, this is an annoying and unfulfilling job. It's a shortcut to burnout, if anything. It's better to reject GenAI completely, for many more reasons than just this. GenAI is an ethical nightmare.
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Complaining about the "LLM voice" is a bit like complaining about the compiler error "voice". I configure my coding LLMs to get to the point and be succinct.It's a computer giving me information, so as long as the communication is clear and efficient, who cares about particular word choices?
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It is so disappointing when otherwise smart people do things like this. They'll say stuff like "I asked [a language model] to explain why it did what it did and it gave me some BS" as if it were a human that could introspect or take responsibility or blame. If you start "calling out" a language model, you have taken the first step on the path…
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As an engineer, I can relate but also found a workaround in deciding what kind of interactions I wanted to have with an LLM. As a coding agent? Yes. As an advisor for life decisions? No. And then there's a lot of in-between where I decide to use an LLM or not based on whether I will dislike the tone.
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I think the key to getting good code out of LLMs is to *raise* your standards. If you're saving some time but the code you are producing is worse, why not choose to invest a little bit of that saved time in making it better instead?
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In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.**This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
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