AI Tribalism

Summary

“Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” – ClickHole “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes, paraphrased 2025 was a weird year for me. If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were amusing toys but inappropriate for real software development. I couldn’t fathom why people would want a hyperactive five-year-old to grab their keyboard every few seconds and barf some gobbledygook into their IDE that could barely compile. Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming. By now the battle lines have been drawn, and these arguments are getting pretty tiresome. Every day there’s a new thinkpiece on Hacker News about how either LLMs are the greatest thing ever or they’re going to destroy the world. I don’t write blog posts unless I think I have something new to contribute though, so here goes. What I’ve noticed about a lot of these debates, especially if you spend a lot of time on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Lobsters, is that it’s devolved into politics. And since politics long ago devolved into tribalism, that means it’s become tribalism. I remember when LLMs first exploded onto the scene a few years ago, and the same crypto bros who were previously hawking monkey JPEGs suddenly started singing the praises of AI. Meanwhile upper management got wind of it, and the message I got (even if they tried to use euphemisms, bless their hearts) was “you are expendable now, learn these tools so I can replace you.” In other words, the people whose opinions on programming I respected least were the ones eagerly jumping from the monkey JPEGs to these newfangled LLMs. So you can forgive me for being a touch cynical and skeptical at the start. Around the same time, the smartest engineers I knew were maybe dabbling with LLMs, but overall unimpres...