My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

New post: "The diminished art of coding" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/03/22/the-diminished-art-of-coding/

I'm still exploring the themes from "We mourn our craft." This post could maybe be summarized as "go touch grass," or more precisely: "go touch poetry."

> Doesn't matter. He has no vision. The point, and there IS a point buried in here somewhere under the Wild Turkey and the gunpowder residue and the faint smell of burning silicon, is that the entire vibe coding movement was a confidence trick played on people who didn't know enough about software to understand they were being conned, by people who ALSO didn't know enough about software to understand they were conning anyone. It was a consensual mutual hallucination. A folie à deux at scale. A collective agreement to pretend that typing English sentences into a chat window was the same thing as engineering, the same way a child pretends that a cardboard box is a spaceship, except the child doesn't charge $20 a month for the cardboard box and the child's cardboard box didn't leak 1.5 million API keys into the open internet.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fear-loathing-vibe-coding-abyss-mark-musson-r2age/