It's worth asking whether LLMs are actually making us more productive at all—and if so, what we might be sacrificing in return.
Andrew Ho on Twitter / X
Not really observations that others before me haven’t made, but:- Despite the seemingly magical nature of LLMs, reflection over a >3 month timescale suggests my total productivity hasn’t increased by over 100%, or perhaps even by over 50%, and a lot of time is actually wasted…— Andrew Ho (@andrewho03) September 3, 2026
LLMs are not like manufacturing machines - Ross Wintle
LLMs are not just machines. They are machine-building machines! This comes with way more responsibility. And understanding it may change how you use them.
The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot
New research confirms that LLMs often perform better when you encourage them. But why?
The Ultimate Guide to Fine-Tuning LLMs from Basics to Breakthroughs: An Exhaustive Review of Technologies, Research, Best Practices, Applied Research Challenges and Opportunities (Version 1.0)
Cognitive exponents and LLM leverage
I know a few people for whom LLMs have been a near-immediate multiplier of attention and effort. I know a lot for whom LLMs clearly make them worse at thinking and doing things. So: why?
The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers
In this article, I share my personal mental model of how LLMs affect software engineers at different levels, and why this leads to both excitement and scepticism.
Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X
this is true and is a big reason why you don’t need to be a highly technical researcher to use LLMs in surprising and novel ways https://t.co/TuxNzXzToU— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 27, 2025
How LLMs are and are not like the brain
Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...
There's Something Fundamentally Wrong With LLMs
LLMs aren't trained on the "vast majority of speech," experts warn, a major blind spot that could have sweeping consequences.
Lincoln Michel on Twitter / X
This was my read on AI from the beginning and it proved very true. Whatever hypothetical benefits LLMs have (and they have some), their main use is to waste everyone's time wading through slop. Longer colleague powerpoints. More spam emails. More slop clogging up all the systems. https://t.co/2gtGfqf7KF— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 21, 2026
An LLM wiki changed how I work
And everything else I learned about productivity this year
kcxt! (@cas@treehouse.systems)
saw someone on HN say they will never contribute to Nura again since we ban LLM generated contributions (they had receipts too, they had contributed in the past) their argument was that having done device porting manually before, doing it with an LLM was something like 10x faster having seen the various LLM driven ports going around, we can't deny that LLMs are capable of doing kernel bringup, finding a functional implementation, and making many more attempts to trial and error than we humans are. of course, this doesn't come without a cost, as with most technical advancements this cost is mostly offloaded onto those without the resources to prevent it -- the under educated working class and the global south, those who will be most affected by droughts and worsening climate change this is reason enough to disengage from this technology, at least the implementations of it that cause most of this harm, but there is another more devious issue that i haven't seen mentioned a whole lot in the same way that huge retail chains and global shipping extract wealth from small towns, LLMs extract knowledge from communities the Nura wiki and other infrastructure was unusable for days at a time due to web scraping, and now imposes a proof of work on visitors (which also prevents access from old devices) now that this data is in accessible models, people who aren't active in our community can use an LLM to port a device, to generate their own private documentation, they can enable devices in the mainline kernel or contribute to other upstreams if their LLM patches are accepted. People that may normally have become active members of the Nura community instead engage with a chatbot operated by big tech, which of course uses their chat history for training new models As maintainers, for us to allow LLMs into our community would in my opinion be the beginning of the end, as our community knowledge base would be gutted, developers would become burnt out and disillusioned, and our culture would be erased.
There continue to be reasons for software to be slow
A discussion on the various reasons why performance is slow, and which ones are unlikely to be affected by LLMs. Originally written as a counter-point to Dan Luu
Scientists Say LLMs Appear to Be Acting as a Cognitive Virus Among Humans
AI's wide proliferation shares some striking similarities with the ways viruses spread, as an international team of researchers argue.
