Who uses LLMs?

There's this common argument that only those who are bad at coding, or don't care about the craft of it, use AI to code. I think this is pretty clearly false. Let's look at a list, shall we?

• Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis

  • Replaced the fast_float C++ library with a pure C implementation in order to make the project more maintainable, removing around 3.5k lines of code on net
  • Wrote a Flux 2 image generation model inference library in pure C with zero external dependencies
  • Wrote a blog post covering some other things he did, and why he is using AI so heavily now: "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

• David Heinemeier Hansson, odious fascist, but still undeniably a good developer, and the creator of Rails and Basecamp:

  • Wrote a blog post about his use of AI agents, here: "Promoting AI agents"

• Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django web framework, board member of the Python Software Foundation, and creator of Datasette:

  • Writes a lot about using LLMs for various things on his blog: SimonWillison.net

• Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, Pygments, Jinja, and a number of other moer or less widely known OSS projects

  • Initially was against AI: "I Think AI Would Kill my Wife"
  • Now is all-in: "AI Changes Everything", "Welcoming The Next Generation of Programmers", "90%" ("For the infrastructure component I started at my new company, I’m probably north of 90% AI-written code.")

• Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and the Git version control system:

  • Wrote a new open source project called AudioNoise with the help of vibe coding: AudioNoise ("Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding.")
  • Has said that: "There is zero point in talking about AI slop. That's just plain stupid. … It's why I strongly want this to be that "just a tool" statement."
  • Has also called himself "a huge believer in AI as a tool."

• Guido van Rossum, creator of Python:

  • In an interview with Lex Fridman, said: "You know where that [coding] is going? GitHub CoPilot. I use it every day, and it writes a lot of code for me."

• John Carmack, creator of Doom, Quake, and pioneer of video games:

  • Has said: "'Coding' was never the source of value, and people shouldn't get overly attached to it. … I suspect that I will enjoy managing AIs more, even if they wind up being better programmers than I am."

• Andrej Karpathy, founding member of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla:

  • Proclaimed that: "The hottest new programming language is English"
  • Uses AI tools like Cursor to build high-performance C code: llm.c

• Mitchell Hashimoto, creator of Ghostty and Terriform:

  • Shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature largely developed by AI

• Peter Norvig, influential educator and AI researcher:

  • In "Large Language Models and the Future of Programming", says "I think in the future, programming is going to be thought of more as a collaboration, not as instructions — it's not the programmer telling the computer what to do, it's the two exploring the space together to solve the problem."

• Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, and Swift:

  • In an inteview with Jeremy Howard, said: "It’s amazing for learning a codebase you’re not familiar with, so it’s great for discovery. The automation features of AI are super important. Getting us out of writing boilerplate, getting us out of memorizing APIs, getting us out of looking up that thing from Stack Overflow; I think this is really profound. This is a good use."
  • Not an unalloyed booster, though: "“Software craftsmanship is the thing that AI code threatens. Not because it’s impossible to use properly—again, I use it, and I feel like I’m doing it well because I care a lot about the quality of the code. But because it encourages folks to not take the craftsmanship, design, and architecture seriously."