I’m for being against LLM, but I am also for using logically sound arguments. I find a far better argument against using it as a developer is: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

Some logical fallacies I see in that writeup:

• Gerrymandered definition
• False dichotomy
• Strawman
• Slippery slope
• Appeal to authority

I won’t go into all of thwm cquse most are boring. But here is some of my thinking.

This one irks me personally the most:

“As a lifelong tool builder and user, I know what tools are.” This is an irrelevant conclusion. Expertise in building tools doesn’t settle a definitional question, and the essays argument still has to stand on its own criteria.

For now, lets accept his definition of a tool and some of the arguments he uses and apply them to some other aspects of computing:

A computer is not held in the hand in any meaningful sense, transmits none of your force, and involves no continuous direction. You enter an expression and it “acts on its own.” By Hickey’s definition, a comouter is “automation for avoiding arithmetic.” or “automation for decoding a binary stream from the internet wire and rendering it in your own mind as a website”. Nobody that uses computers has hesitated to call it a tool for computation. And nobody thinks it makes the user less of a professional while using them.

Lets do another one, closer to the topic of programming: A compiler. You hand it source code, it acts entirely on its own, and under Hickey’s logic it is “automation for avoiding translating to machine code.” Yet the compiler is the pardigmatic programmer’s tool, and nobody claima programmers who use compilers failed to learn programming. If “acts on its own after a request” disqualifies an LLM, it disqualifies half the toolchain that built the software the essay was presumably written in.