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".
Yes! And the problem with decidability is you don't which problem will be undecidable. You can only just try and they it's like "well couldn't find a solution, so it might be undecidable". So we'll need to put limits on how many tokens an AI should use before giving up, put limits on what it tries to do or we'll be burning thousands of dollars on tokens and coming up with nothing. There will need to be a lot of judgement used on where we apply the algorithm.
Judging when to use an algorithm and when not to use an algorithm based around how expensive it will be in terms of resources? That's just another day for a software engineer.
You have a valid point. I think currently there are assists which we know an LLM definitely can do for us. Like mechanical tasks. And tasks which we know LLM can never do. In between there is a gray area. I think we will learn about the gray area over time.
Also I would like automatic generation of programs. But I don't think an LLM is the last stop for it. I personally research in the field of Genetic Programming. I strongly believe in future we could have tools which generate or optimize programs when guided by a human. Currently we have Evolutionary Art and Music which do the same. Tho they are far from being actually usable, this is the same with every technology in the beginning.
Also see this talk: https://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.04.16/slides-djb-20150416-a4.pdf