The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway. | Jeremy Theocharis<br>JT'>Skip to main contentThe LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.<br>2026-07-15<br>I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, and I also feel like that sometimes because of this dissonance, but I don’t think I am alone with it.<br>This week I was at Local-First Conf in Berlin, and the dissonance was everywhere. Armin Ronacher had just given a talk about building machine entities. He created Flask and was one of the early team members of Sentry, so he is clearly a good software engineer. Just recently he founded his company Earendil, which builds Pi.dev, an “open-source coding agent harness”. After the talk you could ask questions via Discord, which would be read out loud on stage, and I asked:<br>are you accepting PRs for Pi, or how do you handle the flood of PRs from LLMs?
He replied, live on stage, in front of the entire audience, that they auto-close almost all PRs and issues. But that one shouldn’t be discouraged from opening PRs, because the human will always shine through.<br>So it is not only me, but apparently some pretty clever engineers too. The people building a tool for working with LLMs are themselves flooded by their own creation, and in order to protect themselves they are auto-closing it all. On their purpose page it says:<br>In a world hurtling towards AI, we believe humans are the best agents.
Again, dissonance.<br>When I was sitting in the audience, I could see a lot of people having Claude Code open. And then the speakers would say these critical things about LLMs, and they would get this big round of applause. Even from the people with their Claude Code open.<br>And again, this dissonance.<br>I spoke at that conference myself, and when I later talked to some of the people, they described the feeling as pretty similar to mine, which is a relief, because I know I am not alone with this.<br>So this article is me trying to describe it. I’ll start by going through all of the fair and valid concerns about using LLMs, the things that would get the big round of applause. Then I will explain what makes me still use LLMs. And I’ll finish up with some of the patterns I found, in the hope that by giving concrete examples, others can step in as well and describe their experiences, so we can all come together and get a better understanding of this dissonance.<br>A few impressions from yesterday‘s talks 📸@adamwiggins.com<br>@martin.kleppmann.com<br>@stevenruiz.bsky.social<br>@jakelazaroff.com<br>— Local-First Conf (@localfirstconf.com) July 13, 2026 at 3:44 PM
LLMs are bad<br>Just by listening to people or the talks or reading HN, I think I got a pretty good sense of why certain people refuse to use LLMs. And what makes it extremely weird is that I agree with almost all of their points!<br>It is full of copyrighted materials, yes. It is bad for the environment, yes. All the ethical problems, yes. And this whole NVIDIA, OpenAI, money-moving circle-jerk is not going to end well. It is a bubble, and it is definitely going to burst.<br>Let me go through the biggest ones one by one.<br>Let’s start with the most common critique “LLMs produce a lot of slop”.<br>Yes, they do. Definitely.<br>If you look at open source software, you will see more and more repos and projects either straight up refusing all types of contributions or trying to put some kind of filters in front of it. Similar to what Armin and Earendil are doing with their auto-closing.<br>I think the core issue here is trust. You should never trust random people on the internet anyway. But before LLMs, there was this base thing: creating a proper PR with proper descriptions would require at least some human time, so it would keep trolls and low quality submissions out. Or at least you could easily filter them out within a couple of seconds. So even if a new person came in, you could trust that this person would have at least spent a couple of hours on that. And then it was probably worth taking a closer look at it.<br>That base thing is not true anymore. Everyone can simply create a new GitHub account and let their LLM loose, and as a maintainer you cannot easily tell whether someone put a lot of time into the PR (and maybe used Claude for just the PR description), or whether it is just an OpenClaw machine acting on its own. Projects like Zig or Gentoo are already refusing to accept LLM generated PRs (which I don’t think is the solution, because how would you even tell?)<br>I think LLMs might have serious potential to kill OSS, if we don’t find ways to restore that trust. One idea could be to only allow a small set of verified people to contribute to a project, and in order to get verified you would need to go to a real-life meetup or something.<br>And then there is the situation about junior engineers. There are actually two different points in there: a) you cannot trust the effort behind your junior’s code anymore, and b) seniors have no incentive left to teach juniors.<br>Let’s...