What Justin Frankel thinks about LLMs
American programmer who created Winamp and founded Cockos, maker of the REAPER audio workstation; writes about programming and the web on his site 1014.org.
Justin Frankel did not write this page.
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7 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Justin Frankel has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsI'm not a fan of LLMs, but I do think what they can do is pretty amazing. Whether it is worth the cost, I have doubts.
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Their wordsLLMs are great as a discovery tool for programming. Google has gone to shit, API documentation is terrible, it's really hard to find answers. LLMs end up indexing a lot of content that would be really hard to find otherwise.
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Their wordsYou can have high quality code produced by an LLM, but it will almost certainly take a ton of work by the human, unless you happen to be writing something that has been totally done before, in which case it will probably just rip that off.
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Their wordsThe better LLMs get at writing code, the more consolidation of wealth will occur, as independent software vendors will not be able to compete with the multinational megacorporations that control all of our infrastructure (read that essay). This will be a very not good thing.
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Their wordsI'm not sure what time it would have saved, and even if it did save time, I don't think I would walk away from the experience with the same level of understanding I've attained going this route.
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Their wordsIf LLMs end up as master programmers, then the billionaires of today will be even richer (ripping off anything useful by burning tokens and then forcefeeding it to the world), and the rest of us, we'll just get the scraps.
- 3 months earlier
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Our readingLLM-scraping bots will kill independent web forums with a million tiny papercuts if allowed.
Their wordsIn short, to use a metaphor, the modern internet (LLM-scraping-bots) will effectively kill a forum like ours with a million tiny papercuts (if allowed).