I work for a tech company you’ve definitely heard of.

I use the “llm” tool every single day. You may not know it, and that’s okay, but Simon’s tools are an immense help to tons of developers using LLMs.

I know it’s fun and trendy to hate on LLMs, but if you’re not productive with them at this point, you’re either:

1. Working on a novel problem or in some obscure language, or

2. Have a skill issue related to how to utilize LLMs.

They are described as being useful for novel problems, but no matter the vendor or if it is an agentic system I set up, or I watch a reasoning model prattle on, I understand those things as filters that are limiting the conceptual search space, and regardless, it is very easy to bump up against the limits. I understand the use as a rubber duck, that's fine, but this cult like belief that we can't criticize is out of control. My skill issue is that I keep trying to use all of these skills and yet I don't have this default pro-LLM belief which seems to be the requirement. Just today I got multiple models to invent QEMU configuration items that don't exist while trying to solve my problem, which I guess I have to say now is novel by your list here, but it was also something pretty easily found in the documentation I later found out... and even knowing that I wasn't able to get the models to understand that even when I explicitly gave them that information. I've had other experiences like trying to squeeze a watermelon seed. At this point, there is just too much risk of anything they produce giving me a wild goose to hunt down. It is absolutely maddening, but also the people telling me I need to pray about it aren't helpful. These things have not fundamentally improved since they did an impression of D&D games, but I can totally see why people would think that. They approach a database with a natural language query interface but that implies that it knows the context of your language and that they have the data, and when they don't, they make it very difficult to find their errors because they are so adjacent to correct.

Oh yeah? Where is all this new great software written by the prompt geniuses?

There is none. All they do is steal from real software developers and blog about the half finished garbage they produce and that no one uses.

That’s what his llm CLI is? I’ve been waiting for this release so I can take my existing notes on best practices coding with LLMs (which I’ve been doing for both work projects and side projects) and try some experiments with rolling a coding agent myself instead of using Claude Code or VS Code’s Agent mode. If it works well then other folks on my team might switch to it too.

I don’t get where you get the idea that people aren’t actually using this stuff and being productive.