(2025-06-19) Suresh Contra Ptaceks Terrible Article On Ai

Nikhil Suresh: Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI. A few days ago, I was presented with an article titled “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts” by Thomas Ptacek. I thought it was not very good, and didn't give it a second thought. To quote the formidable Baldur Bjarnason: “I don’t recommend reading it, but you can if you want. It is full of half-baked ideas and shoddy reasoning.

• (2025-06-02) Ptacek My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
• (2025-06-09) Bjarnason Trusting Your Own Judgement On AI Is A Huge Risk

Let me be extremely clear — I think this essay sucks and it's wild to me that it achieved any level of popularity.

I. Immediate Red Flags

Ptacek's begins with this throat-clearing:
“First, we need to get on the same page. If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing.”

We've just started, and I am going to ask everyone to immediately stop. Is this not suspicious? All experience prior to six months ago is now invalid? Does it not reek of “no, no, you're doing Scrum wrong”?

But then why did people sound exactly the same six months ago?

instead of invalidating all audience experience that wasn't within the past six months why doesn't someone just demonstrate this?

I've really tried to work with you on this one. I reached out to my readers and found a recent example, which was surprisingly hard for something that should be ubiquitous, and it was... you know, fine! Cool, even. It is immensely at odds with your later descriptions of the productivity gains one might expect.

II. Trash-Tier Ethics

No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.”

This is phenomenally sloppy thinking

Ethics are complicated, but nonetheless murder is illegal!

A lot of developers like piracy and argue in bad faith about it, therefore it's okay for organizations that are beginning to look increasingly like cyberpunk megacorps, without even the virtue of cool aesthetics, to siphon billions of dollars of wealth from working class people?

III. Why The Appeals To Random Friends?

I actually looked up multiple videos of people doing some live AI programming. And I went hey, this seems okay

“I’m sipping rocket fuel right now,” a friend tells me. “The folks on my team who aren’t embracing AI? It’s like they’re standing still.” He’s not bullshitting me. He doesn’t work in SFBA. He’s got no reason to lie.

This whole article, I thought that you were making the case that this thing was crazy awesome. Now there's a sudden reference to some unnamed friend, with an assurance that he isn't bullshitting you and he has no reason to lie? Why are we resorting to your kerosene-guzzling compatriot?

you've also overlooked that people have a spectacular capacity for self-delusion. People don't just lie to get VC money, although this is admittedly a great driver of lying, they can also lie because they're wrong or confused or excited.

*Am I better than an LLM agent at interrogating OpenSearch logs and Honeycomb traces? No. No, I am not.”

See, this, this I can relate to. There are quite a few problems where I make the assessment that my frail human mind and visual equipment are simply not up to the task on short notice, and then I go “ChatGPT, did I fuck up?*

A good amount of time waste in software engineering are more advanced variants of when you're totally new and do things like forgetting errant ;s.

LLMs make some of that available on tap, instantly and tirelessly, and this is not to be sneezed at.

But rocket fuel?

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Nat Bennett about AI in their own programming, as I was trying to reconcile Kent Beck's love for LLM-driven programming with my own lukewarm experience.

Nat did not say “Yes, use LLMs, you fucking moron”.
Nat (later): “I do think, by the way, that it is entirely possible that we're all getting punked by what's essentially a magic mirror. Which is part of why I'm like, only mess with this stuff if it's fun.”

The magic mirror line is exactly the sort of thing that Bjarnason hinted at in the article linked at the very beginning, arrived at independently

being ready to try repeatedly? This does not sound like rocket fuel.

Is it not, perhaps, a possibility that your friend is excited by a shiny new tool and has failed to introspect adequately as to their true productivity? There are, after all, literally hundreds of thousands of people that think playing Jira Scrabble is an effective use of their time, and they also do not have a reason to lie to me about this. Nonetheless, every year, I must watch sadly as they lead my dejected peers to the Backlog Mines, where they will waste precious hours reciting random components of the Fibonacci sequence.

IV. Is AI Getting The Right Level Of Attention?

I have been assured that there was a phase in the IT world where, upon bringing any project to management, they would say “Why isn't there a mobile app in this project?”. This is because many people are very credulous, especially when they are spending other people's money.

The last time I attended a conference, the room was full of non-technicians paying lip service to the Holy Trinity Of Things They Can't Possibly Understand — blockchain, quantum, AI.

Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can't fund any projects if they don't pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it's the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world.

I personally know people from university whose retirement plan is “AI makes currency obsolete before I turn 40”. I understand that you don't care if that happens

But given that you can find thousands of people saying these things by glancing literally anywhere, how can you also say the technology is getting the correct amount of attention? This is wild.

V. These Executives Are Grifting Or Incompetent

Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from.”
Do you get where they're coming from? Do you really? Re-read what you just wrote and repent for your conciliatory ways.

If you, a person I believe is not a tech executive and is bullish on the technology, can identify that this is bad technology strategy in presumably ten milliseconds of thought, what does that say about the people who are doing this?

Where they're coming from is:

• a ) trying to stoke their share prices via frenzied speculation
• b ) trying to generate hype so they can IPO and scam some gamblers
• c ) being fucking morons

It's so obvious that you didn't bother explaining why it's bad strategy because you know that we all know. They have misaligned incentives or do not know what they're doing. This isn't like a grandmaster losing to Magnus Carlsen because they played a subtly incorrect variant of the Sicilian thirty-five moves ago. We're talking about supposedly world-class leaders sitting down and going “I always move the horsies first because it's hard to see the L-shapes”. (4-D chess)

Good strategy could perhaps be something like gently suggesting people experiment with LLMs in their workflows, buying a bunch of $100 licenses, and maybe paying for some coaching

Whenever someone announces they are going AI first, I am the person that gets the emails from their engineering teams and directors describing what is really happening in-house. I've received emails that are probably admissible as evidence of intent to defraud investors.

VI. Killing Strawmen

People are very miscalibrated on GenAI in both directions. Did you know the angriest message I got about my stance on AI is that I was too pro-AI? I also cringe whenever someone says “stochastic parrot” or “this is just pattern-matching and could never be conscious”. We actually have no idea what makes things conscious, and we have very little idea re: how human brains work

The former category of maximalist AI-haters exist on Mastodon, which most executives do not know exists and certainly do not use to guide the allocation of society's funding

The latter category of trembling AI sycophants is literally killing people — I know of a hospital in Australia that is wasting all their time on AI initiatives, which caused them to leave data quality issues unfixed, which caused them to under-report COVID-19 deaths, which caused a premature lifting of masking policies.

VII. Why The Half-Hearted Defense Of Artists?

For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine.”

I don't understand why you've ceded authority on these artistic endeavors. LLMs are better for writing than they are for programming! It is much harder to complect most forms of written content into such a state that you will cause slowdowns further down the line than it is to screw up a codebase

If you're inclined to believe people who are skeptical of AI writing, it probably follows that you should also not be so flabbergasted by programmers having doubts.

And then you go on to say this anyway!
“We imagine artists spending their working hours pushing the limits of expression. But the median artist isn’t producing gallery pieces. They produce on brief: turning out competent illustrations and compositions for magazine covers, museum displays, motion graphics, and game assets.”

So are we leaving the arts out of it or not?