How LLMs Killed Programming's Greatest Virtue

This essay examines how Larry Wall's ideal of 'laziness'—the virtue of investing intellectual effort into elegant abstractions that make future work easier—has been displaced by a culture of brute-force productivity amplified by LLMs. For developers relying on AI coding assistants, this shift prioritizes rapid code generation over thoughtful design, risking technical debt and unmaintainable systems. The tension reveals a fundamental question: whether speed defines programming excellence, or if the craft still demands the wisdom to build elegant, sustainable solutions.