LLMs Are Killing the Programmer's Most Important Virtue: Laziness

Bryan Cantrill revisits Larry Wall’s famous “three virtues of a programmer” - laziness, impatience, and hubris - to argue that LLMs are undermining the most critical one. Wall’s laziness wasn’t about avoiding work; it was about investing effort upfront to build clean abstractions that save everyone time later. That kind of laziness requires deep thinking, constraint, and taste. LLMs, which face no time constraints and bear no cognitive load, produce the opposite: ever-expanding piles of code with no pressure toward simplicity.

Cantrill points to Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan’s boast of writing 37,000 lines of code per day with LLM assistance as a case study in misguided metrics. A Polish engineer’s teardown of Tan’s project revealed bundled test harnesses, a default Rails app, a stray text editor, and eight variants of the same logo - one zero bytes. The output was voluminous but architecturally hollow, exactly what you get when production cost drops to zero and no one applies editorial judgment.

The deeper concern isn’t that LLMs produce sloppy code - that’s fixable. It’s that a culture already drifting toward hustle-porn productivity theater now has a tool that supercharges that impulse. Cantrill argues LLMs are powerful engineering tools, but only when wielded in service of the hard, unglamorous work of simplification. Without human laziness acting as a constraint, systems get larger instead of better.