Elliot Morris

Everyone’s having a-ha moments with LLM’s. The new GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5 models have once again changed the game, they’re now good enough to write 90% of all your code, even skeptics are turning around and hopping onboard. Wow! Can’t wait to see it.

Whilst I’m not being totally sarcastic in my desire to have my mind changed, you can tell from my tone I’m not there yet. What folk speak about concerning their a-ha moments does not resonate with me, to the extent that I wonder sometimes if we’re even in the same profession. Join me in popping the cork as I officially become an LLM malcontent.

Greenfield work

Obviously LLMs seem good at this, because engineers who can barely invoke a compiler also seem good at this. Greenfield work is so delightful because you can’t really get it wrong, there are no awkward pylons jutting out of the ground or ancient utilities you need to know how interact with just so. Just how many of you are doing greenfield work as your main thing? Am I out of touch?

I remain suspicious of greenfield work that happens quickly. LLM’s or no, if you show me a lot of visible progress all at once for a new project, I am going to assume you’re building a toy that is ignoring all the sticky complexities of the problem domain. This was true before LLM’s, and is especially true now.

Publishing open source repositories

Seriously who the fuck cares. Your project is probably pointless. Before LLMs there was an oversupply of unproven toy projects, and now that’s even worse. Publishing a project that doesn’t get adopted is negative value. That’s fine, I’m proud of you, everyone needs to learn. But you must realize that until you’re actually supporting serious users you have achieved less than zero when it comes to delivering value.

I suspect many people have fallen into the trap of thinking that the code that makes up their project is what gives it value. Code has no inherent value, it only has inherent cost.

Writing better code

“Claude writes better code than I do”

What the fuck do you mean?

Like what, it’s prettier? More performant? Has fewer edge cases? Runs on a larger swathe of target architectures? Better documents its preconditions? Has fewer dependencies? Will put you in a better world-line 6 months from now such that you can trivially integrate unforeseen use cases? Has sniffed out the way the wind is blowing among the technical directors and CTO and has left its options open for the big change that everyone says isn’t going to happen but you are pretty sure actually is?

This is one I just don’t understand. “Good code” obviously doesn’t exist outside of an extremely trivial set of metrics, and we’ve never even agreed on what those are!

However, Bad Code does exist. There is code with memory leaks, code that crashes, code that doesn’t report errors richly enough. Maybe this is what people mean, LLM’s tends not to output Bad Code? I can agree with that.

“Claude writes better code than I do”

Oh no.

Better search

Okay, I care about this a little. I think this is what most people are practically using LLMs for, both inside and outside the engineering profession. Whilst I am a claude code enjoyer, the majority of my LLM usage remains simple questions.

I’m going to try and leave my intense, seething rage at the absolute devastation of the commons LLM companies enacted in order to pull this off aside, in order to make a smaller point.

Traditional search is better than LLMs. Google used to be good, it’s one of my great fears that people will forget this. People called it magic in the same way people seem stunned by the capabilities of LLMs today. It was telepathic, it just knew what you wanted. You could even learn google-fu and make it even better. I would instantly remove all LLM tooling from my workflow if it meant I could go back to 2015 google, but alas, the need to extract wealth has eliminated that possibility, I doubt the internet as it stands could even support search that good anymore.

Do people not realize the same enshittification is going to happen with these tools? We are being forced to become dependent on these centrally controlled systems for something as essential as easy access to information. It’s disgustingly transparent, and obviously catastrophic in ways that reach beyond mere software engineering. Yet, here I am here typing questions into claude the same as everyone else, because it’s the only easy option. I hate myself.

Finally, a note on the discourse.

To those who think I’m being a moron, that I’m being biased, closed-minded, will be left-behind, etc. That’s great for you! The best part of your position is that you being correct makes me irrelevent. You have no incentive to argue back at me. Let my complaints hit the wind and become evidence of my idiocy. You’re going to out-compete me in the market anyway right?

Maybe show a little grace and let us losers have our tantrums before we are drummed out of the profession, you’ve nothing to lose either way.