@madcoder LLMs are brute force, just like a fuzzer. If paired with an objective and airtight criteria for success (like crashing a process), then brute force can work, yes.
At the technology level, rather than blockchain and the metaverse in search of a problem, I think LLMs are more like Electron and NoSQL. You can't be bothered to structure your data, so you just chuck it all in a JSON file and let the code loop over it to find what it needs. Rather than engineering a UI, you just throw together a bunch of HTML and CSS, and let an old version of Chrome figure out how to arrange them on the screen, somehow.
The result is that every messenger app is now 4 processes, uses 2 GB of RAM and 15% CPU power when idle, XSS and URL redirects are real attack vectors, and it takes a full 5 seconds to load 80 MB of app data on startup. And that was bad enough already when it was just Electron and NoSQL, but now this level of quality is being brought to operating systems, compilers, hardware and every other aspect of computing.
People can say that there will be code review and quality control all they want, but we all know that that's bullshit. The real reason why NoSQL, Electron and LLMs are everywhere is not because they improve anything, but because they help in racing to the bottom. Managers worldwide have every incentive to cut back on costs, and little to no incentive for quality control. Especially in software projects with big existing user bases, where the breaking point will only come months or years down the line.
I've already had to use software that was vibecoded from the ground up. Where buttons didn't work, filtering options only had to work once and then you had to reload, some of your settings were never saved, and data was not consistently displayed. And this wasn't years ago, it was in 2026.
Every other week I have to debunk some blog post or paper or whatever that talks about Apple Silicon Macs having EL3, about entitlements that don't exist, LARPing about non-existent ROM bugs in the latest iPhone, or whatever other hallucinated bullshit.
I think the reason why I have such a deep hatred for LLMs is in part because they accelerated the race to the bottom tenfold, and in part because they poison the information well that was already in a dire-enough state as it were. Where it previously felt like swimming against the tide, it now feels like swimming up a waterfall with a diesel locomotive strapped to my back.
I don't care if people run scripts locally that were written by an LLM or by their cat. What I care about is the quality of critical digital infrastructure, and I'm convinced that that will decrease drastically over the next couple of years. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but unfortunately my pessimism has a depressingly accurate track record.
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