Hendrix College CS professor publishes an open letter urging students to prioritize craft, deep thinking, and ethical limits, and refuses to use LLMs in any form.
Key Takeaways
Anti-LLM stance is ethical, not technical: cites labor exploitation, resource waste, and skepticism that LLMs add real value even when technically capable.
Frames himself as a “generative AI vegetarian,” pointing to Sean Boots’ essay as the fuller argument for opting out entirely.
Student advice: refactor until code is clear and elegant, write documentation for humans, and resist pressure to cut corners when everyone says go fast.
Urges students to set moral and ethical limits before facing pressure, not after: don’t compromise principles “just for now” expecting to fix it later.
Teaching background spans Haskell at UPenn, functional programming and algorithms across 10+ years at Hendrix, Williams College, and Penn.
Hacker News Comment Review
Dominant industry pushback: the craft-first, go-slowly advice strikes experienced engineers as academic and career-risky; refactoring to elegance and avoiding speed pressure are luxuries most product jobs don’t allow.
Partial agreement on deep-thinking and distraction-resistance advice, seen as practically valuable independent of the LLM debate and consistent with personal experience.
Pushback on the framing that technology is uniquely harmful now: commenters noted programmable computers were built in 1945 for artillery tables and immediately used for nuclear weapons design.
Notable Comments
@cdfalcon: argues the craft advice “seems like a straight path towards unemployment” for engineers without industry experience informing the professor’s framing.
@cdot2: “The first general purpose, programmable computer was designed in 1945 to calculate artillery firing tables” – counters the implied novelty of tech-as-harm.
