dax @thdxr

i landed on a somewhat disturbing vision for how LLMs + coding might play out

the past week i've been using opencode as much as possible to stress test before its launch - think there's a cursed set of properties here that hasn't been seen much with other tech

i've talked before about how the key thing with vibe coding is that it is low exertion - asking an LLM to build something allows you to turn your brain off while it executes

it's often slower, it often does it wrong, it costs literal money - but it lets you be lazy

even if it takes 30 minutes and 5 prompts to do a task that should take 10min of focus for a human - you get to spend 25 of those minutes with your brain idling

we were talking about this as a team and everyone had an unflattering example of kicking some work to the LLM so they could watch youtube - it's less efficient but it feels better

we of course had cases where it let us parallelize work but these lazy scenarios are undeniably a real thing - they are replacing moments where you'd be in flow state

LLMs seem to have a weird combination of properties - they are

- less efficient
- lower quality
- allows you to be lazier

any tech with the last bullet point always wins - it's impossible to fight but it's usually paired with efficiency or quality

but in this case it looks more like a future where everyone is mindlessly prompting so they can spend more time scrolling tiktok

the output will be worse and everything will take longer and we lose all the second order benefits of doing focused work

Apr 28, 2025 View on X →

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1916677040171856277