What Bryan Cantrill thinks about LLMs
Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. Created DTrace at Sun Microsystems and was CTO of Joyent; blogs about systems software, open source and engineering culture.
Bryan Cantrill did not write this page.
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6 dated positions, 2025 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Bryan Cantrill has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsTo answer the first question, readers can absolutely tell. To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it's as if the writer's intellectual fly is open.
↗The revolt of the readerbcantrill.dtrace.org 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsIf readers choose to ignore you (perhaps forever!), you will have undermined yourself: instead of attracting readers you will be actively repelling them. So other judgement about its use aside, using an LLM will increasingly become simply... ineffective.
↗The revolt of the readerbcantrill.dtrace.org 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
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Their wordsThe 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.
↗The peril of laziness lostbcantrill.dtrace.org 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsLeft unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better - appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.
↗The peril of laziness lostbcantrill.dtrace.org 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAs 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.
↗The peril of laziness lostbcantrill.dtrace.org 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsBut LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you. At best, they will wrap your otherwise real content in constructs that cause people to skim or otherwise stop reading; at worst, they will cause people who see it for what it is to question your authenticity entirely.