Antirez, the creator of Redis, recently argued that expert programmers using AI should think of themselves as being Linus Torvalds. The key part of his analogy is this: Automatic programming, instead, in the hands of people that are expert technicians, or expert programmers, expert designers, expert software architects, is to assume the role of Linus, with the agents and the LLMs assuming the role of the different maintainers of the different subsystems. This analogy does not work for me. As they exist today, I cannot be Linus and an LLM cannot be my subsystem maintainer. Why? In one word: trust. Linus trusts his subsystem maintainers. He is able to focus on the big picture, safe in the knowledge that his lieutenants will consistently exercise good judgment in the long-term maintenance of their subsystems. He knows this because they have earned his trust by proving themselves over and over again. Every time I have tried to give current LLMs the opportunity to prove themselves in this way, I’ve ended up regretting it. At a high level, I simply dislike too many of the decisions they make. This has happened even in areas (performance, databases, developer tool UX) where I feel qualified to judge how well an AI is doing. I’ve written about this in depth in my account of building Syntaqlite with AI, but beyond this, I’ve used LLMs in many different ways both in my job and in other side projects.
From Java Monoliths to LangGraph Agents: What Transfers