The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.

2026-07-15

I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, and I also feel like that sometimes because of this dissonance, but I don’t think I am alone with it.

This week I was at Local-First Conf in Berlin, and the dissonance was everywhere. Armin Ronacher had just given a talk about building machine entities. He created Flask and was one of the early team members of Sentry, so he is clearly a good software engineer. Just recently he founded his company Earendil, which builds Pi.dev, an “open-source coding agent harness”. After the talk you could ask questions via Discord, which would be read out loud on stage, and I asked:

are you accepting PRs for Pi, or how do you handle the flood of PRs from LLMs?

He replied, live on stage, in front of the entire audience, that they auto-close almost all PRs and issues. But that one shouldn’t be discouraged from opening PRs, because the human will always shine through.

So it is not only me, but apparently some pretty clever engineers too. The people building a tool for working with LLMs are themselves flooded by their own creation, and in order to protect themselves they are auto-closing it all. On their purpose page it says:

In a world hurtling towards AI, we believe humans are the best agents.

Again, dissonance.

When I was sitting in the audience, I could see a lot of people having Claude Code open. And then the speakers would say these critical things about LLMs, and they would get this big round of applause. Even from the people with their Claude Code open.

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