A Hendrix College CS professor publishes a letter to students advocating craft, deep thinking, and ethical limits while refusing all LLM use.
Key Takeaways
Prof. Yorgey calls himself a “generative AI vegetarian,” rejecting LLMs over labor exploitation, resource waste, and doubts about real-world benefit.
Students are told to refactor until code is elegant, write docs for humans, and resist pressure to cut corners or move fast.
Urges setting ethical limits upfront; warns against compromising principles “just for now” while planning to find something better later.
Yorgey teaches functional programming, Haskell, discrete math, and algorithms at Hendrix; prior teaching includes Penn CIS 194 and Williams College.
Cultivating deep focus requires actively defending distraction-free space, including saying no to technologies others call critical or inevitable.
Hacker News Comment Review
Practitioners pushed back hard on the “go slowly, refactor for elegance” advice as disconnected from industry; several framed it as a path toward unemployment for new graduates, not craft.
The anti-LLM stance drew direct challenge: the “exploitation” and “profligate use of scarce resources” framing was called debatable, with tptacek quoting the full passage as the implicit rebuttal.
Ethics-in-engineering resonated with some commenters; a UK mechanical engineering commenter noted required ethics modules covering Bhopal, contrasting that culture with how CS programs typically handle ethics.
Notable Comments
@jackdk: Yorgey authored a respected functional pearl on monoids; notes an Anthropic campus talk left the impression “if Anthropic are the good ones, we’re really going to be in for a rough time.”
@cdot2: The first general-purpose programmable computer (1945) was built for artillery firing tables and immediately used for nuclear weapon design, questioning whether technology was ever ethically neutral.
