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The peril of laziness lost

Bryan Cantrill · 12 Apr 2026

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  1. The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage.
  2. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better - appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.
  3. As I expanded on in my talk The Complexity of Simplicity, this is a significant undertaking - and we cannot expect LLMs that do not operate under constraints of time or load to undertake it of their own volition.

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