A Pragmatic Approach to LLMs — Anna Liberty

A Pragmatic Approach to LLMs

2026-06-08 · 9 min · #computing

I don't vibecode. I don't use LLMs willingly. Every line of code I write is my own or generated deterministically through a process I fully understand. Considering the world is divided over LLMs these days, I wanted to share my particular perspective on why I chose the path I have, as well as some of the places I do think LLMs are appropriate.

Why I Don't Vibecode

I have never used Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or any other tool intended to replace or augment the software development process with LLMs. I have not used agentic coding, nor am I interested in spending the money to try it. In spite of this, I have kept up to date with the latest developments in agentic coding from academic and interpersonal perspectives. Because of this understanding, I decline to participate in vibecoding or any other use of LLMs in generating code.

There are a few reasons for this.

Enjoying the Craft

First of all, I enjoy programming. It may be frustrating to deal with the complexities of writing code, especially if you're doing it at the wrong layer of abstraction, but I don't believe automating it is the answer. The friction involved in writing code forces me to consider the approaches I'm using and take a step back. That friction is what often keeps me from writing something half-baked and developing something beautiful.

The more that our software toolchains disable thought, the more we lose of our craft. For me, that trade is never going to be worthwhile.

Surrendering Autonomy

Since programmable personal computers were accessible to people, we have been able to reprogram them according to our whims. There have been restrictions that we've had to fight back against, but we've held onto enough autonomy to create our own software without having to get a corporation's permission (though this has by no means been universal, and it's closing rapidly).

I want to be able to exercise my own skills on my own device, aided by a community of others with similar goals. I don't want to spend money on my own skills. Nor do I want to generate mountains of LLM-generated code that's impossible to review or maintain without a subscription to an OpenAI or Anthropic model, which keep increasing the price to modify your own code.

I see it as a trap. Become dependent on the tools today by atrophying your skills, becoming addicted, and creating otherwise unmaintainable codebases, and then being charged much more for it once you have no other option. Programming as a hobby should never cost $1000, $200, or even $20 per month.

Simply put, I don't want to rent my brain.

I See the Slop

These days, so much open-source software has embraced corporate LLMs. It's disheartening. I keep seeing people use LLMs to create software that barely works and publishing it to the wider Web. Sometimes it looks "professional", with its README put together. It's signal-shaped noise—made to look like a real project with real effort put into it but a simple production of an agentic slot machine.

I sometimes wonder if SDPX-style identifiers that identify LLM-involvement in a software project would be helpful. Something like LLM-assisted, LLM-generated, and LLM-free. Then developers could scan their dependencies for instances of it. I'm not sure this would work, since users of LLMs have been dishonest and will likely continue to be.

This is even worse with contributions. Any open-source project with a modicum of popularity is being inundated with LLM-generated pull requests and patches. Projects don't want to reject genuine human contributors but filtering out the noise is becoming increasingly difficult.

I believe Zig's ban of LLMs is a better approach than Ladybird's ban of external contributors. There may be some niche use-cases of LLMs, but overall they are making open source worse.

They're the Wrong Approach

Many people see LLMs as the future of human-computer interaction. They see them as the new compilers that transform natural language into computer languages. I'm not going to go into this too much because I've addressed this before, but I will say that the primary difference is determinism.

There is a deterministic pipeline from your source code to the machine code that runs on your system. You know what you are getting when you compile your code. It's a bug if the compiler misinterprets that code if you wrote it correctly. You also keep that code after you compile it. None of those are true in the case of LLMs.

I support creating a higher-level approach to programming that more closely resembles natural language. I want everyone to be able to exercise control over their computers. LLMs just aren't the model for that.

Legal Risk

In many places, the legal status of LLM-generated code and other works is unclear. There are many ongoing lawsuits which have yet to be resolved, especially internationally. I want the code I write to be...