I am an LLM productivity skeptic.

I find LLMs useful as a sort of digital clerk - searching the web for me, finding documentation, looking up algorithms. I even find them useful ^{in a limited coding capacity; with a small context and clear guidelines.}

But doing "prompt-driven development" or "vibe coding" with an Agentic LLM was an incredibly disapointing experience for me. It required an immense amount of baby sitting, for small code changes, made slowly, which were often wrong. All the while I sat there feeling dumber and dumber, as my tokens drained away.

Of course that was my experience, and my preference. I genuinely don't mind if other people vibe code. Go for it! I do not deny this kind of coding is enabling a lot of people - who aren't experienced devs - to create things they would never otherwise be able to create. (Also, sometimes they pay me to clean them up afterwards, which is nice.)

But that is not enough for the vocal proponents. It's the future! You'll be left behind! Software has changed forever! And then, inevitably, comes the character evaluation, which goes something like this:

You - a senior dev - are resisting this change due to deeply held psychological fears of being made irrelevant and/or having to learn new things. You are stuck in your ways and unwilling to change them because you are afraid.

This has always baffled me, because quite frankly I like the idea of agentic coding. I often feel the actual implementation is a bottleneck to the things I want to create. I would love it if I could just sit around making specs (yes I am a programmer who enjoys this) and have little machines implement it for me perfectly. It's a wonderful fantasy world, and I wish I could inhabit it. That's why I was so disappointed.

And it made me think - why are these people so insistent, and hostile? Why can't they live and let live? Why do they need to convince the rest of us? And to be honest, I am developing my own character evaluation. It's not very charitable, but it is making a lot of sense to me:

You tried agentic coding. You realised it was better at programming than you are. You see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers ^{claiming they are more productive without it. Could they just be that much better at programming than I am? No! They are just threatened. They are the ones who are insecure! I'm a great developer!}

It's projection. Their evangelism is born of insecurity.

I am still willing to admit I am wrong. That I'm not holding the agents properly. That doing this is it's own skill and I have not spent enough time with it. I have changed my mind on tech before, and I'm sure I will do so again.

LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were.