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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Technology
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Is it, though? In the early 1990s I could still optimize compiler output by hand, here and there. In the 1980s it was common practice and necessary in many circumstances to make complex things happen on the constrained hardware. In the 1970s there were a lot of programmers who never touched Fortran, just practiced assembly all the time because Fortran was too inefficient for their needs.
I'll say that LLMs, this year, are something like compilers were in the 1960s - a revolutionary improvement in accessibility of coding, being able to express what you want in "natural language" - like COBOL did starting in 1959.
LLMs have plenty of pitfalls that COBOL doesn't today, but I'll note that Borland Turbo C++ compiler in 1991 was too damn buggy to do anything much more complex than "Hello, World." with.
Yes. Acting like an LLM over a programming language is anything close to a higher level over lower level programming language makes you completely full of shit.