this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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I personally think both pro LLM and anti LLM are wrong. One group think they are gods. The other think they are demons. LLMs can be useful for programming to some extent. But they will create a disaster if you don't know what are you doing. I have recently published a post about the matter on me blog. I think the best part is:
So if you want to make some changes to the code which don't require intelligence, that is they are just mechanical tasks, LLMs are good. If you want the LLMs to understand semantics of your code, you have chosen the wrong tool. Maybe in future we'll have new AI software and tools which also understand semantics to some extent. But I highly doubt a transformer will be able to do it. They just predict the next likely token.
There is something I haven't yet added to the post. So I am writing it here. Our computers are Universal Turing Machines. There are some fundamental limits to what a turing machine can't do. Those are called undecidable problems. For instance a turing machine can never check if two pieces of code are semantically equivalent[1]. But that's what human programmers can do. That's why I emphasize on tasks which require no intelligence.
[1] That's about the general case. Sure there are exceptions. But as we say "exception is not the rule".
Most of the "undecidable" are only undecidable for a subset of the problem instances, while a vast number of instances can be even trivially decidable. For example in the undecidable halting problem, both you and a computer can trivially deduce that
while(true)will not halt. In the same way a computer can deduce that many instances of two pieces of code are semantically equivalent.I'd like to see an instance of the problem where a human could decide it and the computer could not.
Hey. The number of problems which can are decidable are infinite as are those which are not. But as soon as there is a backward jump in your code, a Turing machine most likely won't be able to decide if it'll halt or not. The
while(true)is an exception. In the real world we have a great number of programs whose loops cannot be decided by a Turing machine. But the programmer who has written the code knows when the loop will terminate.If we see the machine code, if there is a conditional backward jump(unlike
while(true)which is unconditional), in the general case it's undecidable.Backwards jumps are equally decidable for turing machines as for humans. Compiler and static code linters can trace through very complicated code and know that it will or will not halt, and optimize or warn based on the result.
I believe there's nothing special about human computation abilities. Anything that is decidable by a human will be also decidable by a computer.
Please prove me wrong by showing a counter example.
I don't have to prove anything to anyone. Nor I've got the time for this. It's up to you to do your research. I have done mine and shared the results. You can take it or leave it.
I admit I may be wrong so I asked you to show me an example, since you talk with such certainty.
In fact this is an open question so nobody knows, even though most of the researchers believe human computation is equal as far as I know.
In the case I'm wrong on this, we'll know in future :)