I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).
Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.
No, they can’t think and reason. However, they can replicate and integrate the thinking and reasoning of many people who have written about similar problems. And yes, they can do it must faster than we could read a hundred search result pages. And yes, their output looks slightly better than many of us in many cases, because they are often dispensing best practices by duplicating the writings of experts. (In the best cases, that is.)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01191
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/researchers-find-llms-are-bad-at-logical-inference-good-at-fluent-nonsense/