Brent A. Yorgey, a computer science professor at Hendrix College in Arkansas, used an open letter to ask a blunt question: what kind of tech industry are students being sent into. Dated April 27, the letter points to a concrete backdrop rather than abstract anxiety — shrinking entry-level software roles, AI-generated code outpacing human output, ongoing disputes over intellectual property, and a shift in the industry from engineering quality to deployment speed.
Six principles aimed at career choices and engineering ethics
Yorgey did not tell students to walk away from computer science. He framed the letter around the reasons he entered the field in the first place: the joy of creating things and the chance to build tools that genuinely help people. His first principle rejects claims that technological change is inevitable or already settled. In his view, that story serves people with a stake in the outcome, while developers still have room to make deliberate choices.
The second principle is about moral boundaries before entering the workforce. Students, he argues, should decide what they will not accept instead of relying on the idea that they can compromise now and sort it out later. The third and fourth principles move to daily practice. He urges students to protect their capacity for deep thought, carve out time and space free from interruption, refactor code until it becomes clear and elegant, and write documentation that other humans can actually read. Sometimes that means moving slower.
The fifth and sixth principles shift from craft to values: put people, relationships, and justice ahead of profit, code, and productivity; let action be driven by love rather than fear. He presents those ideas less as slogans than as operating rules for the kind of engineers students may become.
Why he refuses to use large language models
Yorgey has also taken a firm position on large language models, saying he does not use them and will not use them in any form. His objection is not that the technology lacks technical interest. He says the problem is structural. In his view, these systems rest on large-scale exploitation of labor and consume scarce resources in wasteful ways.
To describe that stance, he adopts the term “generative AI vegan,” borrowed from an article by Canadian tech policy researcher Sean Boots. The phrase refers to a conscious refusal to participate, not because participation is impossible, but because it is not seen as beneficial to humanity. Yorgey says he agrees with Boots almost completely. He also mentions that on worse days, he feels closer to Anthony Moser, who identifies as an “AI hater.”
At the same time, he does not dismiss LLMs as technically uninteresting. He explicitly says they are fascinating on a purely technical level. What he rejects is the commercial and social structure surrounding them: questions over training data sources, environmental costs tied to computing power, and what he sees as weak real-world performance in many of the use cases most often promoted.
A small voice, but a broader tension
By scale, Yorgey is an outlier. Hendrix College is a small liberal arts school, and his letter is unlikely to change OpenAI’s training budget or delay any company roadmap. Still, the conflict he describes reaches beyond one campus.
His argument is that computer science education is designed to train people who think deeply, care about craftsmanship, and take responsibility for the social effects of technology. The market, by contrast, is rewarding engineers who ship fast, deliver scale, and tolerate blurry ethical limits. That gap sits at the center of his message to students. He closes with a line that captures the letter’s logic: be driven by love rather than fear. The engineers shaped by those two motives, he suggests, will not build the same kind of technology.