The Real Reason LLMs Write “Smart” Code With Stupid Syntax Errors

The Real Reason LLMs Write “Smart” Code With Stupid Syntax Errors We’ve all seen it: You ask an LLM to write some Rust or Python. The algorithm is correct, the architecture is clean… …and then the code doesn’t even compile because of trivial syntax or type errors. Most people hand‑wave this away as: “LLMs are just stochastic parrots” or “they don’t really understand code.” I think that’s wrong. The deeper issue is this: LLMs are anthropomorphic by default. They treat compilers, interpreters, and runtimes as if they were other minds with intent , instead of blind formal systems. Once you see that, the error pattern stops looking random and starts looking inevitable. LLMs Don’t See Code as Physics, They See It as Psychology When humans read and write code, we’re constantly doing two things at once: Modeling what the machine will do (formal semantics, types, control flow). Modeling what another human intended (API design, variable naming, error messages). We can explicitly flip between th