cd /news/large-language-models/the-attack-on-competence · home topics large-language-models article
[ARTICLE · art-28881] src=deadsimpletech.com ↗ pub= topic=large-language-models verified=true sentiment=↓ negative

The attack on competence

A software engineer argues that management rewards incompetent developers who produce large volumes of code using LLMs, while punishing competent engineers who write careful, maintainable code. The author claims that incompetence is actively wanted and competence is actively punished in many organizations.

read1 min views1 publishedJun 1, 2026

The competent LLM-using engineer will, in general, find themselves treated by management as though they're exactly as bad as the people who refuse to use LLMs at all. The engineers who push out pull request after pull request and line upon line of code without any thought given to maintainability, codebase conventions or such trifles as whether the fucking thing works at all are lauded, while the competent, careful people who ship carefully considered, working code (with or without LLM assistance) and clean up the messes find themselves sidelined or redundant. The reasons are often as stupid as the fact that a competent engineer, even using an LLM, will tend to prompt less and consume fewer tokens than the incompetent ones. The fact that the product breaks goes unmentioned. One can quite easily draw the conclusion that, far more than competence merely being an indifferent to management, incompetence is actively wanted and competence actively punished.

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