Against LLM Doomerism
⁜ 2026-08-14 (last updated: 2026-08-16) by giulianopz
In this age of great technological leaps and marketing hype, one has to carefully scrutinise his/her beliefs and opinions to preserve his/her mental stability. Programmers, especially, are among the most affected (although if privileged) categories, as prosumers of this AI/LLM revolution (which started not so long ago, in November 2025).
One has to remember that LLMs are just another tool in the programmer’s toolbox, even if of a very different kind, and restrain oneself from both LLM haters and LLM evangelists.
The community of programmers has been sharing its thought to help navigate the uncharted waters of this exciting yet troublesome transition. Reading what has popped up recently can serve as a valuable guide:
- The Value of Things, Bob Nystrom
- LLMs Reward Expertise, Sean Goedecke
- Don’t be a meat proxy, Niklas Gruhn
- Understanding is the new bottleneck, Geoffrey Litt
- “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers, Senko Rašić
- I costi del software: far emergere ciò che il mercato non prezza, Paolo Benanti (from an Italian priest!!! worth clicking on
文/Ain your browser)
They all seem to (involutarily or not) refer to some well-known essays from the past:
- Programming as Theory Building, Peter Naur
- Reflections on Trusting Trust, Ken Thompson
- Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich
A critical view of LLMs does not downplay the scientific significance of their discovery; their success is a severe comment on how most of linguistics has ignored probabilistic approaches to the study of language.
Instead, it should protect people (programmers and non-programmers) from cognitively surrendering to a consensual hallucination that presents LLMs as a God-like Logos (an infinite wording that generates all the reality).
It’s clear that we are also in the middle of a crisis of presence. I borrow the term from the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino. It describes a profound existential moment in which an individual feels the acute risk of losing their place in history, society, and reality itself, effectively threatening their capacity to act as a human being and to transform the world through their actions.
This already happened in history. Thousands of years ago, in an Age of Anxiety, the Christian religion emerged, saturating the offering of meaning, order, and consolation in a time where the Roman Empire was collapsing; and it used people’s spiritual needs to effectively exercise a biopolitical force.
Everyone knows (or should know) the final outcome of this story.
Knowing where to place our trust and how things work (do you remember the “build X from scratch/build your own X” frenzy raging just a few months ago?) remains relevant. LLMs are just a (powerful) tool to augment our zone of proximal development, to put it into psychological terms. But no technology is neutral. It’s up to us to make it a convivial tool that can help humanity to advance in history as a whole towards a better future.