by happytoexplain | 2026-02-09 21:04:21+00:00
>"Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent

This is certainly untrue. I want to say "obviously", which means that maybe I am misunderstanding you. Below are some examples of negative sentiments programmers have - can you explain why you are not counting these?

NOTE: I am not presenting these as an "LLMs are bad" argument. My own feelings go both ways. There is a lot that's great about LLMs, and I don't necessarily agree with every word I've written below - some of it is just my paraphrasing of what other people say. I'm only listing examples of what drives existing anti-LLM sentiment in programmers.

1. Job loss, loss of income, or threat thereof

These two are exacerbated by the pace of change, since so many people already spent their lives and money establishing themselves in the career and can't realistically pivot without becoming miserable - this is the same story for every large, fast change - though arguably this one is very large and very fast even by those standards. Lots of tech leadership is focusing even more than they already were on cheap contractors, and/or pushing employees for unrealistic productivity increases. I.e. it's exacerbating the "fast > good" problem, and a lot of leadership is also overestimating how far it reduces the barrier to creating things, as opposed to mostly just speeding up a person's existing capabilities. Some leadership is also using the apparent loss of job security as leverage beyond salary suppression (even less proportion of remote work allowed, more surveillance, worse office conditions, etc).

2. Happiness loss (in regards to the job itself, not all the other stuff in this list)

This is regarding people who enjoy writing/designing programs but don't enjoy directing LLMs; or who don't enjoy debugging the types of mistakes LLMs tend to make, as opposed to the types of mistakes that human devs tend to make. For these people, it's like their job was forcibly changed to a different, almost unrelated job, which can be miserable depending on why you were good at - or why you enjoyed - the old job.

3. Uncertainty/skepticism

I'm pushing back on your dismissal of this one as "not anti-LLM sentiment" - the comparison doesn't make sense. If I was forced to only review junior dev code instead of ever writing my own code or reviewing experienced dev code, I would be unhappy. And I love teaching juniors! And even if we ignore the subset of cases where it doesn't do a good job or assume it will soon be senior-level for every use case, this still overlaps with the above problem: The mistakes it makes are not like the mistakes a human makes. For some people, it's more unnatural/stressful to keep your eyes peeled for the kinds of mistakes it makes. For these people, it's a shift away from objective, detail-oriented, controlled, concrete thinking; away from the feeling of making something with your hands; and toward a more wishy-washy creation experience that can create a feeling of lack of control.

4. Expertise loss

A lot of positive outcomes with LLMs come from being already experienced. Some argue this will be eroded - both for new devs and existing experienced devs.

5. The training data ownership/morality angle