this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Programming
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Being a good lead means knowing when someone's not going to cut it, and when to let them go to protect the rest of the team. My boss recently failed to do so, and 3 people got laid off as a result because the money spent on the rotten apple was used compensating for their lackluster output and could not be used to pay the good employees' salaries.
Additionally, it also means seeing through your colleagues' bullshit (blame deflection, deception) and reacting accordingly. And even when you see through the bullshit, you sometimes need to compromise and learn to tolerate it because the tradeoff is worthwile. Sometimes.
Thanks for judging my performance as a lead based on fuck all. Now, moving on the point at hand.
You're spot on when saying that LLMs are not human beings and don't have intentions. The truth is, I don't actually care. The tech is advertized as a replacement for human programmers, and I judge on its actions in that context.
Moving back to your point - you're right that it doesn't lie. It's an analogy. However, it gaslights like a pathological liar and does the things it's been specifically told to not do, and does so repeatedly. If a human acted similarly, it'd be gone without delay, even when omitting the quality issues it has which humans also have.
This is a weird outcome and contrary to the experiences of most users. The tendency that is commonly observed is that, on the contrary, agents don't really "hold opinions" and flip-flop the moment you start challenging them. I'd be curious to learn what model and setup gave you an agent that defends its hallucinations because that is definitely an outlier in a world of sycophantic models that have been RLHF'd to hell and back.
In my experience, this is a tell that you are holding it very wrong. You can shit on models for having no creativity or losing track of long horizon tasks but following instructions is the one thing they do well. Again, stupid model or stupid harness, or you're just not holding the pointy end in the right direction.
US tech marketing is done by assholes targeting morons. It is probably safer to never, ever take their statements at face value.
There are 2 categories of people who are dead wrong about agentic coding : rabid vibe-coders who think it 10x their productivity (it doesn't, it just exacerbates their worst tendencies), and people like you who think it's good for nothing. Both categories are just vibing based on a gut feeling. But in the middle there is a whole spectrum of actually interesting experimentation, if you are ready to fist fight your personal assumptions and be fact-based about it.
It's not weird. The good side of the LLM craze is that its failures are documented at length all over the Internet. It's in every tech blog out there, even in those run by users of agents. There isn't a day without a LLM article on the front page of HN and Lobster.rs.
I don't actually hate the tech itself, and, like most, am pretty impressed at what it can do at the moment - the way I'm impressed by what the useless Boston Dynamics robots can do.
I oppose LLM usage for practical, very rational reasons. The most important aspect is an ethical one: the planet is burning, I don't want to make things worse by using something that barely even works.
There is another, very important aspect: I can't actually run it locally, which means relying on it means depending on external suppliers from an enemy country that may cut the pipes without prior notice, as it tried to do very recently.
Additionally, the costs are very high, increasing and enshittification has barely even started. Once monopolies are established, I don't want to have to pay soaring cartel prices for a shitty service I could have avoided depending upon to begin with.
There's still a broad range of domains that are fundamentally incompatible with usage of LLMs because of reliability and/or confidentiality reasons, and I want to remain employable as a software engineer and stand out from the legion of CRUD developers whose skills will inevitably atrophy as LLM adoption increases.
I do see how I could use them sporadically, but cf. reason #1. Using LLMs is immoral.
And I do know how to do my job. I don't have a velocity issue. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.