March 12, 2026
Ship it or script it?
I don't use LLMs for programming
Coders split: write it yourself or let the bots cook
TLDR: Neil Madden says he skips coding chatbots to keep learning by doing, and the crowd split fast: purists love the craft, power users let bots write while they make decisions, and ethics hawks question uncredited data. It matters because your next app—and job—may hinge on which camp wins.
Security researcher Neil Madden says he doesn’t use LLMs—those chatty “large language model” bots—for coding, citing classic quotes about how teaching a machine makes you learn better. Cue the irony: his blog software offered to “improve” those quotes with AI. And then the comments lit up like a code review on Friday afternoon.
One camp cheered the hands-on craft. “I actually enjoy the process,” said one, using AI only as a sidekick, not a stand‑in. Another added that by the time you’ve explained a feature to a bot, you could’ve just written it—so why outsource the fun? The ethics crowd came in hot too: why support “hoovering up” everyone’s writing without credit just to skip the part they love—programming.
The other camp slammed the gas. A few pros said they’ve gone full autopilot: letting Claude run across their codebase “basically unsupervised,” focusing on the big calls—architecture and shipping—while bots crush the boring bits. A 30‑year veteran claimed they barely type code anymore and even server setup is easier with a chatbot. The thread’s running joke became “shipping over syntax,” with commenters turning “syntax is a side quest” into a battle cry. It’s a vibes war: joy of building vs joy of shipping, with ethics simmering underneath. Read the post here.
Key Points
- •Neil Madden states he does not use large language models (LLMs) for programming.
- •He frames his reasoning via quotes emphasizing learning through explanation and step-by-step thinking (Douglas Adams).
- •He highlights the value of the learning process itself over possession of knowledge (Carl Friedrich Gauss).
- •He cites the idea that certainty of understanding comes from programming (Alan Perlis).
- •He notes the irony that WordPress offered to “improve” the quoted text with AI.