Reading up on LLMs

Hacker News commenters express nostalgic love for computers, lament modern AI non-determinism, yet acknowledge LLMs as useful for rapid prototyping.

LLMs often create the illusion of productivity while actually reducing real output through cognitive debt, maintenance overhead, and misaligned incentives.

Software teams costing €130k per engineer per year must generate 3–5× that to be viable, yet most lack financial visibility, a condition now exposed by AI.

Because LLMs drastically lower the cost of cleaning up messy code, engineers should take more intentional technical debt now and trust future models to service it.

Falling costs of LLM-generated code shift software engineering bottlenecks to infrastructure, CI, human-guided abstractions, and code review in 2026.