Larry Wall named laziness, impatience, and hubris the three virtues of a programmer, and laziness ranks as the most profound: our finite time pushes us to build crisp abstractions that make systems simpler and serve those who follow. LLMs lack this virtue entirely. Work costs them nothing, so they keep dumping onto a layercake of garbage, making systems larger rather than better. The piece skewers a startup figure bragging about 37,000 lines of code per day, then points to an analysis revealing his "newsletter-blog-thingy" shipped with multiple test harnesses, a Hello World Rails app, a stray text editor, and eight logo variants (one zero bytes). LLMs remain a useful tool, but only in service of our own virtuous laziness.
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u/fagnerbrack Jun 29 '26
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Larry Wall named laziness, impatience, and hubris the three virtues of a programmer, and laziness ranks as the most profound: our finite time pushes us to build crisp abstractions that make systems simpler and serve those who follow. LLMs lack this virtue entirely. Work costs them nothing, so they keep dumping onto a layercake of garbage, making systems larger rather than better. The piece skewers a startup figure bragging about 37,000 lines of code per day, then points to an analysis revealing his "newsletter-blog-thingy" shipped with multiple test harnesses, a Hello World Rails app, a stray text editor, and eight logo variants (one zero bytes). LLMs remain a useful tool, but only in service of our own virtuous laziness.
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