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> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the nor

by dakiol 1y ago

> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming. Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM, that not using them would be like not using an IDE or vim nowadays), since everyone is using private LLMs. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.

azan_ 1y ago
Paid models are just much, much better.
- dakiol 1y ago
  Of course they are. I wouldn't expect otherwise :) But the price we're paying (and I don't mean money) is very high, imho. We all talk about how good engineers write code that depends on high-level abstractions instead of low-level details, allowing us to replace third party dependencies easily and test our apps more effectively, keeping the core of our domain "pure". Well, isn't it time we started doing the same with LLMs? I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. That would at least allow us to switch to a free and opensource version if the companies behind the private LLMs go rogue. I'm afraid tho that wouldn't be enough, but it's a starting point. To put an example: what would you think if you need to pay for every single Linux process in your machine? Or for every Git commit you make? Or for every debugging session you perform?
  - azan_ 1y ago
    > I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. That would at least allow us to switch to a free and opensource version if the companies behind the private LLMs go rogue. I'm afraid tho that wouldn't be enough, but it's a starting point. There are open source tools that do exactly that already.
    - dakiol 1y ago
      Ah, well that's nice. But every single post I read don't mention them? So, I assume they are not popular for some reason. Again, my main point here is: the normalization of using private LLMs. I don't see anyone talking about it; we are all just handing over a huge part of what it means to build software to a couple of enterprises whose goal is, of course, to maximize profit. So, yeah, perhaps I'm overthinking I don't know; I just don't like that now these companies are so ingrained in the act of building software (just like AWS is so ingrained in the act of running software)
      - rahimnathwani 1y ago
        But every single post I read don't mention them? Why would they? Does every single post about a Jetbrains feature mention that you can easily switch from Jetbrains to an open source editor like VS Code or vim?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - Arainach 1y ago
        >every single post I read don't mention them Because the models are so much worse that people aren't using them. Philosophical battles don't pay the bills and for most of us they aren't fun. There have been periods of my life where I stubbornly persisted using something inferior for various reasons - maybe I was passionate about it, maybe I wanted it to exist and was willing to spend my time debugging and offer feedback - but there a finite number of hours in my life and often I'd much rather pay for something that works well than throw my heart, soul, time, and blood pressure at something that will only give me pain.
  - airstrike 1y ago
    None of that applies here since we could all easily switch to open models at a moment's notice with limited costs. In fact, we switch between proprietary models every few months. It just so happens that closed models are better today.
  - ghm2180 1y ago
    > I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. Has someone computed/estimated what is at cost $$$ value of utilizing these models at full tilt: several messages per minute and at least 500,000 token context windows? What we need is a wikipedia like effort to support something truly open and continually improving in its quality.
  - simonw 1y ago
    > I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. I have been building that for a couple of years now: https://llm.datasette.io https://llm.datasette.io
  - vunderba 1y ago
    > an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones Fortunately there are many of these that can integrate with offline LLMs through systems like LiteLLM/Ollama/etc. Off the top of my head, I'd look into Continue, Cline and Aider. https://github.com/continuedev/continue https://github.com/continuedev/continue https://github.com/cline/cline https://github.com/cline/cline https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider
  - IanCal 1y ago
    > Well, isn't it time we started doing the same with LLMs? I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. Almost all providers and models can be used with the OpenAI api and swapping between them is trivial.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  They are a little better. Sometimes that little bit is an activation-energy level of difference. But overall, I don't see a huge amount of difference in quality between the open and closed models. Most of the time, it just takes a little more effort to get as good of results out of the open models as the closed ones.
belter 1y ago
The issue is somebody will have to debug and fix what those LLM Leeches made up. I guess then companies will have to hire some 10x Prompters?
muglug 1y ago
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Yet JetBrains has been a business longer than some of my colleagues have been alive, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic/C++/Studio made writing software for Windows much easier, and did not come cheap.
- dakiol 1y ago
  I see a big difference: I do use Jetbrains IDEs (they are nice), but I can switch to vim (or vscode) any time if I need to (e.g., let's say Jetbrains increase their price to a point that doesn't make sense, or perhaps they introduce a pervasive feature that cannot be disabled). The problem with paid LLMs is that one cannot easily switch to open-source ones (because they are not as good as the paid ones). So, it's a dependency that cannot be avoided, and that's imho something that shouldn't be overlooked.
  - eevmanu 1y ago
    Open-weight and open-source LLMs are improving as well. While there will likely always be a gap between closed, proprietary models and open models, at the current pace the capabilities of open models could match today’s closed models within months.
  - wepple 1y ago
    Anyone can switch from Claude to llama?
    - dakiol 1y ago
      I don't think so. Let's do a silly experiment: antirez, could you ditch Gemini 2.5 PRO and Claude Opus 4, and instead use llama? Like never again go back to Gemini/Claude. I don't think he can (I don't think he would want to). I this is not on antirez, this is on everyone who's paying for LLMs at the moment: they are paying for them because they are so damn good compared to the open source ones... so there's no incentive to switch. But again, that's like the climate change: there's no incentive to pollute less (well, perhaps to save us, but money is more important).
bgwalter 1y ago
Yes, and what is worse is that the same mega-corporations who have been ostensibly promoting equity until 2025 are now pushing for a gated development environment that costs the same as a monthly rent in some countries or more than a monthly salary in others. That problem does not even include lock-in, surveillance, IP theft and all other things that come with SaaS.
righthand 1y ago
It’s weird that programmers will champion paying for Llm but not ad-free web search.
- haiku2077 1y ago
  I pay for search and have convinced several of my collaborators to do so as well
  - righthand 1y ago
    I think the dev population mostly uses free search, just based on the fact no one has told me to “Kagi it” yet.
    - haiku2077 1y ago
      When I need a facial tissue I ask for a Kleenex even if the box says Puffs. Because who says "pass me the Puffs"?
      - martsa1 1y ago
        I've been curious of that phenomenon, why not juat ask "pass me a tissue?"
        haiku2077 1y ago
        Cuz all the adults around me called it a Kleenex when I was growing up and I've internalized the word for that kind of tissue is Kleenex
        righthand 1y ago
        Good old American brand loyalty.
      - righthand 1y ago
        I say “tissue” and “web search” so you’re talking to the wrong guy with that. Even though growing up everyone around me has said Kleenex and Google.
glitchc 1y ago
I'm certain these are advertorials masquerading as personal opinions. These people are being paid to promote the product, either through outright cash, credits on their platform or just swag.
- tptacek 1y ago
  So, just so I have this straight, you think antirez is being paid by Google to hype Gemini.
  - Herring 1y ago
    A lot of people are really bad at change. See: immigration. Short of giving everyone jazz improv lessons at school, there's nothing to be done. To be fair, change is not always good. We still haven't fixed fitness/obesity issues caused (partly) by the invention of the car, 150 years later. I think there's a decent chance LLMs will have the same effect on the brain.
- simonw 1y ago
  I recommend readjusting your advertorial-detecting radar. antirez isn't taking kickbacks from anyone. I added a "disclosures" section to my own site recently, in case you're interested: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
  - amirhirsch 1y ago
    It started out as an innocent kv cache before the redis industrial complex became 5% of the GDP
floucky 1y ago
Why do you see this as a strong dependency? The beauty of it is that you can change the model whenever you want. You can even just code yourself! This isn't some no-code stuff.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Change the model, learn how to talk to a new and poorly documented model, and get entirely different results. Yep, easy as pie.
jstummbillig 1y ago
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Since when? It starts with computers, the main tool and it's architecture not being free and goes from there. Major compilers used to not be free. Major IDEs used to not be free. For most things there were decent and (sometimes) superior free alternatives. The same is true for LLMs. > The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. That "excuse" could exactly capture the issue. It does not, because you chose to make it a weirder issue. Just as before: You will be free to either not use LLMs, or use open-source LLMs, or use paid LLMs. Just as before in the many categories that pertain to programming. It all comes at a cost, that you might be willing to pay and somebody else is free to really does not care that much about.
- randallsquared 1y ago
  > Major compilers used to not be free. Major IDEs used to not be free. There were and are a lot of non-free ones, but since the 1990s, GCC and interpreted languages and Linux and Emacs and Eclipse and a bunch of kinda-IDEs were all free, and now VS Code is one of the highest marketshare IDEs, and those are all free. Also, the most used and learned programming language is JS, which doesn't need compilers in the first place.
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    There are free options and there continue to be non-free options. The same is true for LLMs.
    - vorador 1y ago
      When's the last time you paid for a compiler?
      - jstummbillig 1y ago
        The original point was that there is some inherent tradition in programming being free, with a direct critique wrt LLMs, which apparently breaks that tradition. And my point is that's simply not the case. Different products have always been not free, and continue to be not free. Recent example would be something like Unity, that is not entirely free, but has competitors, which are entirely free and open source. JetBrain is something someone else brought up. Again: You have local LLMs and I have every expectation they will improve. What exactly are we complaining about? That people continue to build products that are not free and, gasp, other people will pay for them, as they always have?
cafp12 1y ago
IMO It's not unlike all other "dev" tools we use at all. There are tons of free and open tools that usually lag a bit behind the paid versions. People pay for jetbrains, for mac os, and even to search the web (google ads). You have very powerful open weight models, they are not the cutting edge. Even those you can't really run locally, so you'd have to pay a 3rd party to run it. Also the competition is awesome to see, these companies are all trying hard to get customers and build the best model and driving prices down, and giving you options. No one company has all of the power, its great to see capitalism working.
- mirekrusin 1y ago
  You don't pay for macOS, you pay for apple device, operating system is free.
  - cafp12 1y ago
    Thanks captain missing the point
    - mirekrusin 1y ago
      You're welcome.
  - kgwgk 1y ago
    You do pay for the operating system. And for future upgrades to the operating system. Revenue recognition is a complex and evolving issue.
antirez 1y ago
It’s not that bad: K2 and DeepSeek R1 are at the level of frontier models of one year ago (K2 may be even better: I have enough experience only with V3/R1). We will see more coming since LLMs are incredibly costly to train but very simple in their essence (it’s like if their fundamental mechanic is built in the physical nature of the computation itself) so the barrier to entry is large but not insurmountable.
positron26 1y ago
If the models are getting cheaper, better, and freer even when we use paid ones, then right now is the time to develop techniques, user interfaces, and workflows that become the inspirations and foundations of a future world of small, local, and phenomenally powerful models that have online learning, that can formalize their reason, that can bake deduction into their own weights and code.
kelvinjps10 1y ago
Doesn't already happen with some people being unable to code without Google or similar?
ozgung 1y ago
> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Just like every other subscription model, including the one in the Black Mirror episode, Common People. The value is too good to be true for the price at the beginning. But you become their prisoner in the long run, with increasing prices and degrading quality.
- lencastre 1y ago
  Can you expand on your argument?
  - jordanbeiber 1y ago
    The argument is perhaps ”enshittification”, and that becoming reliant on a specific provider or even set of providers for ”important thing” will become problematic over time.
  - x______________ 1y ago
    Not op but a something from a few days ago that might be interesting for you: 259. Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users (techcrunch.com) 395 points by mfiguiere 2 days ago | hide | 249 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598254
  - nico 1y ago
    Currently in the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622953 It isn’t specific to software/subscriptions but there are plenty of examples of quality degradation in the comments
  - signa11 1y ago
    enshittification/vendor-lockin/stickiness/… take your pick
  - nicce 1y ago
    There is a reason why companies throw billions into AI and still are not profitable. They must be the first ones to hook the users in the long run and make service necessary part of user’s life. And then increase the price.
webappguy 1y ago
I personally can’t wait for programming to ‘die’. It has stolen a decade of my life minimum. Like veterinarians being trained to help pets ultimately finding out a huge portion of the job is killing them. I was not sufficiently informed that I’d spend a decade arguing languages, dealing with thousands of other developers with diverging opinions, legacy code, poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks, etc if you have been in the game at least a decade please don’t @. Adios to programming as it was (happily welcoming a new DIFFERENT reality whatever that means). Nostalgia is for life, not staring at a screen 8hrs a day
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Feel free to change careers and get lost, no one is forcing you to be a programmer. If you feel it is stealing your life, then please feel free to reclaim your life at any time. Leave the programming to those of us who actually want to do it. We don't want you to be a part of it either
  - oblio 1y ago
    Don't be rude.
    - __loam 1y ago
      He's being honest, not rude
      - oblio 1y ago
        Honesty doesn't look like this: > [...] get lost [...] > [..] We don't want you to be a part of it either. [...] He's being rude. Honesty would be, something like: > I (and probably many others) like programming a lot. Even if you're frustrated with it, I think a great deal of people will be sad if somehow programming disappeared completely. It might be best for you if you just found a job that you love more, instead. Also the original comment makes a point that's SUPER valid and anyone working as a professional programmer for 10+ years can't really deny: > poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks Most commercial code just sucks due to misaligned incentives. Open Source is better, but not always, as a lot of Open Source code is just commercial code opened up after the fact.
jacooper 1y ago
Kimi k2 exists now.
kelvinjps10 1y ago
LLMS are basically free? Yes you're rate limited but I have just started paying for them now, before I'd bounce around between the providers but still free
- jacobr1 1y ago
  The most cutting edge-models aren't usually free, at least at first.
  - ipaddr 1y ago
    They are good enough for 90% of people and 90% of cases that I would trust an llm for. What advantages are people getting on these new models?
simonw 1y ago
The models I can run locally aren't as good yet, and are way more expensive to operate. Once it becomes economical to run a Claude 4 class model locally you'll see a lot more people doing that. The closest you can get right now might be Kimi K2 on a pair of 512GB Mac Studios, at a cost of about $20,000.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  This is the thing. I'm waiting for the equivalent of Google Coral[0], but powerful enough for AI workloads. You can plug in the $60 Coral to a Raspberry Pi and get real-time image recognition running in Frigate. When I can have: 1) Something similar inside my computer/laptop 2) Something I can plug in to my computer via USB-C 3) Something I can buy and install to my LAN so all devices in my home can connect to it I'll buy it instantly. What I don't want is a massive generic GPU that just happens to be good at AI workloads, I want custom hardware that's more efficient and cheaper. (Off topic, but my guess is that Apple is aiming for #3 with an Apple TV variant so you can have more power than your phone, but still keep it 100% local) [0] https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- QRY 1y ago
  Have you considered the Framework Desktop setup they mentioned in their announcement blog post[0]? Just marketing fluff, or is there any merit to it? > The top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration with 128GB of memory starts at just $1999 USD. This is excellent for gaming, but it is a truly wild value proposition for AI workloads. Local AI inference has been heavily restricted to date by the limited memory capacity and high prices of consumer and workstation graphics cards. With Framework Desktop, you can run giant, capable models like Llama 3.3 70B Q6 at real-time conversational speed right on your desk. With USB4 and 5Gbit Ethernet networking, you can connect multiple systems or Mainboards to run even larger models like the full DeepSeek R1 671B. I'm futsing around with setups, but adding up the specs would give 384GB of VRAM and 512GB total memory, at a cost of about $10,000-$12,000. This is all highly dubious napkin math, and I hope to see more experimentation in this space. There's of course the moving target of cloud costs and performance, so analysing break-even time is even more precarious. So if this sort of setup would work, its cost-effectiveness is a mystery to me. [0] https://frame.work/be/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desktop https://frame.work/be/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desk...
Fervicus 1y ago
> I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies.
- LeafItAlone 1y ago
  You mean the same companies they are hosting their VCS in and providing the infrastructure they deploy their codebases to? All in support of their CRUD application that is in a space with 15 identical competitors? My codebase is not my secret sauce.
  - Fervicus 1y ago
    Sure, the codebase itself isn't special. But it's the principle and ethics of it all. These companies trained their models unethically without consequence, and now people are eating up their artificially inflated hype and are lining up to give them money and their data on a silver platter.
    - LeafItAlone 1y ago
      My opinion is that the value to be that I’ve been getting out of these tools in both my personal and professional projects is greater than value that they (and others using the downstream effects of them) get out of having my particular codebases. Also, many of my personal projects are open sourced with pretty permissive licensing, so I’m not all that mad someone else has the code.
- geoka9 1y ago
  > > I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming > > And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies. And how they don't mind opening up their development machines to agents driven by a black-box program that is run in the cloud by a vendor that itself doesn't completely understand how it works.
fragmede 1y ago
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Not without a lot of hard thankless work by people like RMS to write said tools. Programming for a long while was the purview of Microsoft Visual Studio family, which cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There existed other options, some of which was free, but, as is the case today with LLMs you can run at home, they were often worse. This is why making software developer tools is such a tough market and why debugging remains basically in the dark ages (though there are the occasional bright lights like rr). Good quality tools are expensive, for doctors and mechanics, why do we as software developers expect ours to be free, libre and gratis?
- bizzletk 1y ago
  Programmers have the ability to write tools that make their jobs/lives easier. This is the perfect alignment of incentives where the person who benefits from the production of a high-quality tool has the ability to deliver one into their hands. And once the tool has been made, many people just give it away for others to benefit from too.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
I rely on these but there's zero loyalty. The moment something better is there, like when Gemini 2.5 Pro showed up, I immediately switch. That's why I drink the whole tools kool-aid. From TFA: > In this historical moment, LLMs are good amplifiers and bad one-man-band workers. That's how I use them: write a function here, explain an error message there. I'm still in control. I don't depend on LLMs: they just amplify. I can pull the plug immediately and I'm still able to code, as I was two years ago. Shall DeepSeek release a free SOTA model? I'll then use that model locally. It's not because I use LLMs that I have a strong dependency on them. Just like I was already using JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA back when many here were still kids (and, yup, it was lightyears better than NetBeans and Eclipse) didn't make me have a strong dependency on JetBrains tools. I'm back to Emacs and life is good: JetBrains IDEs didn't make me forget how to code, just as LLMs won't. They're just throwaway tools and are to be regarded as such.
throw-number9 1y ago
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible .. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Yeah, coding (and to a lesser extent IT in general) at one point was a real meritocracy, where skill mattered more than expensive/unnecessary academic pedigree. Not perfect of course, but real nevertheless. And coders were the first engineers who really said "I won't be renting a suit for an interview, I think an old t-shirt is fine" and we normalized that. Part of this was just uncompromisingly practical.. like you can either do the work or not, and fuck the rest of that noise. But there was also a pretty punk aspect to this for many people in the industry.. some recognition that needing to have money to make money was a bullshit relic of closeted classism. But we're fast approaching a time where both the old metrics (how much quality code are you writing how fast and what's your personal open source portfolio like?) and the new metrics (are you writing a blog post every week about your experience with the new models, is your personal computer fast enough to even try to run crappy local models?) are both going to favor those with plenty of money to experiment. It's not hard to see how this will make inequality worse and disadvantage junior devs, or just talented people that didn't plan other life-events around purchasing API credits/GPUs. A pay-to-play kind of world was ugly enough in politics and business so it sucks a lot to see it creeping into engineering disciplines but it seems inevitable. If paying for tokens/GPU ever allows you to purchase work or promotion by proxy, we're right back to this type of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the_British_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
LeafItAlone 1y ago
>I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM As of now, I’m seeing no lock-in for any LLM. With tools like Aider, Cursor, etc., you can swim on a whim. And with Aider, I do. That’s what I currently don’t get in terms of investment. Companies (in many instances, VCs) are spending billions of dollars and tomorrow someone else eats their lunch. They are going to need to determine that method of lock-in at some point, but I don’t see it happening with the way I use the tools.
- jerrygenser 1y ago
  They can lock in by subsidizing the price of you use their tool, while making the default price larger for wrappers. This can draw people from the wrapper that can support multiple models to the specific CLI that supports the proprietary model.
  - aseipp 1y ago
    Anthropic or Google offering a product and having margins they leverage is not "lock in" when there are dozens of alternatives at many various price points, including ones that can be run entirely locally (at high capex cost). It's like market fact #0 that, today, there is very little moat here other than capital, which is why OpenAI has now got multiple viable competitors despite their head start. Their APIs get copied, their tools get copied, the only way they remain competitive is with huge investments back into the core product to retain their leads. This is just what a competitive market looks like right now, and these offerings exist exactly because of downward pressure from other forces. The goal is of course to squeeze other players as much as possible, but these products have not yet proven to be sticky enough for their mere existence to do that. And there are many other players who have a lot of incentive to keep that downward pressure applied. What you're describing is really just called "Offering a product for sale" and yes typically the people doing it will do, say, and offer things that encourage using their product over the competitors. That isn't "lock in" in any sense of the word. What are they supposed to do? Say "Our shit sucks and isn't price effective compared to others and we bring nothing to the table?" while giving you stuff for free?
  - 1y ago
rapind 1y ago
Not an issue and I'll tell you why. If the gains plateau, then there's really no need to make productivity sacrifices here for the societal good, because there's so much competition, and various levels of open models that aren't far behind, that there will be no reason to stick with a hostile and expensive service unless it's tooling stays leaps ahead of the competition. If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways, and will need to pivot to... something? So I sympathize, but pragmatically I don't think there's much point in stressing it. I also suspect the plateau is coming and that the stock of these big players is massively overvalued.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  > If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways I think there's room for more nuance here. It could also be a situation of diminishing returns but not a sharp plateau. That could favour the big players. I think I find that scenario most likely, at least in between major breakthroughs.
  - rapind 1y ago
    Well diminishing returns will have the same effect as a plateau. If you're on a log with your (much cheaper, Chinese) competition, then your advantage is very quickly microscopic.
    - cutemonster 1y ago
      Can't AIs plateau at a prohibitively hight cost, so only the biggest companies can build the really good ones. Search engine tech isn't that much of a secret nowadays? Still it's prohibitively expensive for almost everyone to build a competitive search engine. What if really good AI turns out to be more like that (both training and inference)
      - rapind 1y ago
        The issue with launching a search engine company is probably mind share more than anything else. Once Google was a verb, it was pretty locked in. Even so, there are alternatives that some people use and find superior, like Kagi and DDG. Now you're seeing a lot of people who just use ChatGPT instead of google for their searches. For AI, I think that ship has sailed already. OpenAI is the closest to dominance, but not currently the best at all tasks (claude and gemini for some tasks), and everyone else is nipping at their heels, followed by open / cheap models anywhere from 6 months to 1 year behind. Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, all evidence points to it becoming a commodity (or utility), similar to cloud computing. For example AWS is pretty dominant in the cloud computing space, but the differences aren't really that big of a deal for most people and there are services that will extract the cloud for you as a generic services layer. Like OpenRouter does for AI models. Is AWS really better than other cloud providers? Maybe, in some situations, with some requirements, but it's definitely not the general rule. Their focus since the beginning has been layering value on top of this base cloud offering (I'd argue to the point where there are so many services it's confusing AF), and I think it's the same with AI providers. It's even the same players for a lot of it (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure all offer AI services).
20k 1y ago
+1, I use exclusively free tools for this exact reason. I've been using the same tools for 15 years now (GCC + IDE), and they work great There is a 0% chance that I'm going to subscribe to being able to program, because its actively a terrible idea. You have to be very naïve to think that any of these companies are still going to be around and supporting your tools in 10-20 years time, so if you get proficient with them you're absolutely screwed I've seen people say that AI agents are great because instead of using git directly, they can ask their AI agent to do it. Which would be fine if it was a free tool, but you're subscribing to the ability to even start and maintain projects A lot of people are about to learn an extremely blunt lesson about capitalism
- moron4hire 1y ago
  A lot of people's problems with Git would go away if they just took a weekend and "read the docs." It's shocking how resistant most people are to the idea of studying to improve their craft. I've been spending time with my team, just a few hours a week, on training them on foundational things, vs every other team in the company just plodding along, trying to do things the same way they always have, which already wasn't working. It's gotten to where my small team of 4 is getting called in to clean up after these much larger teams fail to deliver. I'm pretty proud of my little junior devs.
  - haskellshill 1y ago
    This is a reply to an old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44452679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44452679 (since I cannot reply in the original thread) > Even assuming python's foreach loop in these cases get optimized down to a very bare for loop, the operations being performed are dominated by the looping logic itself, because the loop body is so simple. > Each iteration of a for loop performs one index update and one termination comparison. For a simple body that is just an XOR, that's the difference between performing 5 operations (update, exit check, read array, XOR with value, XOR with index) per N elements in the one loop case versus 7 operations (update, exit, read array, XOR with value, then update, exit, XOR with index) in the two loop case. So we're looking at a 29% savings in operations. > It gets worse if the looping structure does not optimize to a raw, most basic for loop and instead constructs some kind of lazy collection iterator generalized for all kinds of collections it could iterate over. > The smaller the loop body, the higher the gains from optimizing the looping construct itself. Let's test your claims import random import time n = int(1e7) A = list(range(1,n+1)) random.shuffle(A) print("Removed:", A.pop()) t = time.time() result = 0 for idx,val in enumerate(A): result ^= idx+1 result ^= val result ^= n print("1-loop:", time.time() - t) print("Missing:", result) t = time.time() result = 0 for value in range(1, n + 1): result ^= value for value in A: result ^= value print("2-loop:", time.time() - t) print("Missing:", result) A sample run gives: Removed: 2878763 1-loop: 1.4764018058776855 Missing: 2878763 2-loop: 1.1730067729949951 Missing: 2878763 And after swapping the order of the code blocks just to ensure there's nothing strange going on: Removed: 3217501 2-loop: 1.200080156326294 Missing: 3217501 1-loop: 1.5053350925445557 Missing: 3217501 So indeed we have about a 20% speedup, only in the complete opposite direction that you claimed we'd have. Perhaps it's best not to assume when talking about performance.
jonas21 1y ago
How is it a strong dependency? If Claude were to disappear tomorrow, you could just switch to Gemini. If all proprietary LLMs were to disappear tomorrow (I don't know how that would happen, but let's suppose for the sake of argument), then you switch to free LLMs, or even just go back to doing everything by hand. There's very little barrier to switching models if you have to.
overgard 1y ago
I think it's an unlikely future. What I think is more likely is people will realize that every line of code written is, to an extent, a liability, and generating massive amounts of sloppy insecure poorly performing code is a massive liability. That's not to say that AI's will go away, obviously, but I think when the hype dies down and people get more accustomed to what these things can and can't do well we'll have a more nuanced view of where these things should be applied. I suppose what's still not obvious to me is what happens if the investment money dries up. OpenAI and Anthropic, as far as I know, aren't anywhere near profitable and they require record breaking amounts of capital to come in just to sustain what they have. If what we currently see is the limit of what LLM's and other generative techniques can do, then I can't see that capital seeing a good return on its investment. If that's the case, I wonder if when the bubble bursts these things become massively more expensive to use, or get taken out of products entirely. (I won't be sad to see all the invasive Copilot buttons disappear..)
- kossae 1y ago
  The point on investment is apt. Even if they achieve twice as much as they’re able to today (some doubts amongst experts here), when the VC funding dries up we’ve seen what happens. It’s time to pay the piper. The prices rise to Enterprise-plan amounts, and companies start making much more real ROI decisions on these tools past the hype bubble. Will be interesting to see how that angle plays out. I’m no denier nor booster, but in the capitalist society these things inevitably balance out.
  - MoreQARespect 1y ago
    The same thing happened with the first internet bubble. It didnt prevent the rise of the internet it just meant some players who, for instance, overinvested in infrastructure ended up taking an L while other players bought up their overbuilt assets for a song and capitalized upon it later.
paulddraper 1y ago
And you thought Visual Studio was free? Or Windows? Or an Apple Developer License? There are free/free-ish, options, but there have always been paid tools.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Paid tools were rarely monthly subscriptions without which you could not produce code or executables. Further, I can write and compile an application for Mac, Windows, or Linux with entirely free tools including tools provided directly by Apple and Microsoft. This discussion is about is a monthly subscription, without which, most up and coming coders, certainly "vibe coders," are completely dead in the water. These two dependencies are not the same. If that's not obvious to you, I don't know what else to say to that.
  - paulddraper 1y ago
    You can write code with free tools.
sneak 1y ago
Strong dependency? I can still code without LLMs, just an order of magnitude slower. There is no dependency at all.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  The dependency arises from rising productivity expectations from employers and the market. A cabbie is still dependent on the car if they can still drive a horse buggy and order of magnitude slower. You are only not dependent if you are not doing this professionally and can enjoy the leisure of tending to your horses.
ls-a 1y ago
Programming on/for Apple has never been free. So it's not a surprise to some engineers. You're right that programming might become the way of Apple in the future. However, I think engineers should rejoice because AI is the best thing that happened to them.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  I paid ~$600 for my first Windows compiler, over a grand in today's money. But I didn't have to keep paying every month forever to be able to code at all. Take Claude or whatever away from a vibe coder and they're completely dead in the water. Apple's fee is like that Visual Studio purchase I made, a fee that lets me compile for their platforms. It's not a subscription without which I can't code anything at all. Creating a new dependency on monthly subscriptions to unsustainable companies or products is a huge step away from accessible programming of the last 50 years and one that should not so casually be dismissed.
vitaflo 1y ago
Most people who develop software expect other people to pay for it. That's why devs make six figures. Yet devs want everything for free to create the software they charge money for? That's a bit hypocritical.
dcre 1y ago
To be pedantic, I think it’s too late for a product with close to a billion monthly active users to be “normalized.”
firecall 1y ago
A big issue will be if we see a further decline in SDK and API documentation. Anecdotally, I recently find myself building a simple enough Android app for a client based on an iOS app I have already built. I don’t really know Android dev, but know enough to get started having patched an App somewhat recently. So started from scratch and having heard that the Android SDK had something similar to SwiftUI that’s what I went for. In building the App I have found that Gemini is far more useful than Googles own documentation and tutorials. The tutorials for basic things like NavBars is just wrong in places, maybe due to being outdated. I’ve reported issues using the feedback tool. But still….
Aurornis 1y ago
> but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming. I don’t understand how people consider this a strong dependency. Changing LLMs is trivial. Some times I’ll switch between LLMs on a whim to experiment. I can close one coding agent app and open another in seconds. These claims about vendor lock-in and strong dependencies seem to mostly be coming from people watching from a distance, not the people on the ground using these tools.
zaptheimpaler 1y ago
Where is the strong dependency? I can point Cursor at Openrouter and use any LLM I want, from multiple providers. Every LLM provider supports the same OpenAI completions API. I wish the stuff on top - deep research modes, multimodal, voice etc. had a more unified API as well but there's very little lock-in right now.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
The advantage of having smarter models is greater than the risk/harm of them being closed source, especially so when speed of execution is a major factor.
hahahal 1y ago
> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 What I thought you were going to say is “Gemini- wha?”. I’ve used Gemini 2.5 PRO and would definitely not use it for most of my coding tasks. Yes, it’s better at hard things, but it’s not great at normal things. I’ve not used Claude 4 Opus yet- I know it’s great at large context- but Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking is mostly good unless the task is too complex, and Claude 4 Sonnet is good for basic operations in 1-2 files- beyond that it’s challenged and makes awful mistakes.
dinkumthinkum 1y ago
If you are so tied to an LLM that you cannot program without one then you are not a programmer. It is not the same as with an IDE or whatever, those are essentially ergonomic and do not speak to your actual competence. This will probably be an unpopular take but its just reality.
nominallyfree 1y ago
Us FORTH and LISP hackers will be doing free range code forever. We can use cheap hardware that can be fixed with soldering irons and oscilloscopes. People said for decades our projects just become weird DSLs. And now whatever little thing I want to do in any mainstream language involves learning some weird library DSL. And now people be needing 24h GPU farm access to handle code. In 50 years my grandkids that wish to will be able to build, repair and program computers with a garage workbench and old wrinkled books. I know most of the software economy will end up in the hands of major corporations capable of paying through the nose for black box low code solutions. Doesn't matter. Knowledge will set you free if you know where to look.
edanm 1y ago
> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Why? If I want to pick up many hobbies, not to mention lines of professional work, I have to pay for tools. Why is programming any different? Why should it be? Complaining that tools that improve your life cost money is... weird, IMO. What's the alternative? A world in which people gift you life-and-work-improving tools for free? For no reason? That doesn't exist. > Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Btw, I think this was actually less true in the past. Compilers used to cost money in the 70s/80s. I think it's actually cyclical - most likely tools will cost money today, but then down the line, things will start getting cheaper again until they're free.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  > Btw, I think this was actually less true in the past. Compilers used to cost money in the 70s/80s. I think it's actually cyclical - most likely tools will cost money today, but then down the line, things will start getting cheaper again until they're free. I don't see it as an inevitable cycle. Free tools (gcc, emacs) and OS (Linux) came about as idealistic efforts driven by hobbyists, with no profit goal/expectation, then improved as large companies moved to support them out self-interest. Companies like RedHat have then managed to make a business model out of selling support for free software. Free LLMs or other AI-based tools are only going to happen where there are similar altruistic and/or commercial interests at play, and of course the dynamics are very different given the massive development costs of LLMs. It's not a given that SOTA free tools will emerge unless it is the interest of some deep-pocketed entity to make that happen. Perhaps Meta will develop and release SOTA models, but then someone would have to host them which is also expensive. What would the incentive be for someone to host them for free or at-cost?
blackoil 1y ago
That's a code time dependency which is of least concern. That's like saying how can a company hire a developer, they are now having a dependency. Code written will continue to run, you can use alternate LLM to further write code. Unless you are a pure vibe coder, you can still type the code. IF programmer stop learning how to write code, that's on them and not Claude's or antirez responsibility. We are using best tool available to us, right now it is Claude Code, tomorrow it may be something from OpenAI, Meta or Deepseek.
PeterStuer 1y ago
I share uour concerns absolutely, and would run an open model local (or self hosted), but for now the reality is that what is available as such is not satisfactory compared to the closed frontier models only available through SaaS. I hope this will change before (captured) regulation strangles open models.
dirkc 1y ago
I've personally felt this way about many proprietary tech ecosystems in the past. Still do. I don't want to invest my energy to learn something if the carpet can be pulled from under my feet. And it does happen. But that is my personal value judgement. And it doesn't mean other people will think the same. Luckily tech is a big space.
KronisLV 1y ago
The software is largely there: you can run Ollama, vLLM or whatever else you please today. The models are somewhat getting there: even the smaller ones like Qwen3-30B-A3B and Devstral-23B are okay for some use cases and can run decently fast. They’re not amazing, but better than much larger models a year or two ago. The hardware is absolutely not there: most development laptops will be too weak to run a bunch of tools, IDEs and local services alongside a LLM and will struggle to do everything at the pace of those cloud services. Even if you seek compromise and get a pair of Nvidia L4 cards or something similar and put them on a server somewhere, the aforementioned Qwen3-30B-A3B will run at around 60 tokens/second for a single query but slow down as you throw a bunch of developers at it that all need chat and autocomplete. The smaller Devstral model will more than halve the performance at the starting point because it’s dense. Tools like GitHub Copilot allow an Ollama connection pretty easily, Continue.dev also does but can be a bit buggy (their VS Code implementation is better than their JetBrains one), whereas the likes of RooCode only seem viable with cloud models cause they generate large system prompts and need more performance than you can squeeze out of somewhat modest hardware. That said, with more MoE models and better training, things seem hopeful. Just look at the recent ERNIE-4.5 release, their model is a bit smaller than Qwen3 but has largely comparable benchmark results. Those Intel Arc Pro B60 cards can’t come soon enough. Someone needs to at least provide a passable alternative to Nvidia, nothing more.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  And models like Qwen3 really don’t match the quality of Opus 4 and Gemini-Pro 2.5. And even if you manage to get your hands on 512GB of GPU RAM, it will be slow. There’s simply so much going on under the hood at these LLM providers that are very hard to replicate locally.
  - justatdotin 1y ago
    its impossible to catch up; but there is still much fertile and prospective territory within reach
- amelius 1y ago
  Didn't Karpathy, in his latest talk, say something along the lines of: don't bother with less capable models, they are just a waste of time.
smokel 1y ago
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. This was largely not the case before 2000, and may not be the case after, say 2030. It may well be that we are living in extraordinary times. Before 2000 one had to buy expensive compilers and hardware to do serious programming. The rise of the commercial internet has made desktop computers cheaper, and the free software movement (again mostly by means of commercial companies enjoying the benefits) has made a lot of free software available. However, we now have mostly smartphones, and serious security risks to deal with.
michaelbuckbee 1y ago
Genuine question as I don't understand the deeper aspects of this, but is it possible that we will see AI specific hardware in the future that will make local AI's more possible? My general thinking is that we're using graphics processors which _work_ but aren't really designed for AI (lack of memory, etc.).
irthomasthomas 1y ago
Kimi K2 competes with these. Even beats them in some evals.

by dakiol 1y ago

azan_ 1y ago

Paid models are just much, much better.

dakiol 1y ago
Of course they are. I wouldn't expect otherwise :) But the price we're paying (and I don't mean money) is very high, imho. We all talk about how good engineers write code that depends on high-level abstractions instead of low-level details, allowing us to replace third party dependencies easily and test our apps more effectively, keeping the core of our domain "pure". Well, isn't it time we started doing the same with LLMs? I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. That would at least allow us to switch to a free and opensource version if the companies behind the private LLMs go rogue. I'm afraid tho that wouldn't be enough, but it's a starting point. To put an example: what would you think if you need to pay for every single Linux process in your machine? Or for every Git commit you make? Or for every debugging session you perform?
- azan_ 1y ago
  > I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. That would at least allow us to switch to a free and opensource version if the companies behind the private LLMs go rogue. I'm afraid tho that wouldn't be enough, but it's a starting point. There are open source tools that do exactly that already.
  - dakiol 1y ago
    Ah, well that's nice. But every single post I read don't mention them? So, I assume they are not popular for some reason. Again, my main point here is: the normalization of using private LLMs. I don't see anyone talking about it; we are all just handing over a huge part of what it means to build software to a couple of enterprises whose goal is, of course, to maximize profit. So, yeah, perhaps I'm overthinking I don't know; I just don't like that now these companies are so ingrained in the act of building software (just like AWS is so ingrained in the act of running software)
    - rahimnathwani 1y ago
      But every single post I read don't mention them? Why would they? Does every single post about a Jetbrains feature mention that you can easily switch from Jetbrains to an open source editor like VS Code or vim?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arainach 1y ago
      >every single post I read don't mention them Because the models are so much worse that people aren't using them. Philosophical battles don't pay the bills and for most of us they aren't fun. There have been periods of my life where I stubbornly persisted using something inferior for various reasons - maybe I was passionate about it, maybe I wanted it to exist and was willing to spend my time debugging and offer feedback - but there a finite number of hours in my life and often I'd much rather pay for something that works well than throw my heart, soul, time, and blood pressure at something that will only give me pain.
- airstrike 1y ago
  None of that applies here since we could all easily switch to open models at a moment's notice with limited costs. In fact, we switch between proprietary models every few months. It just so happens that closed models are better today.
- ghm2180 1y ago
  > I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. Has someone computed/estimated what is at cost $$$ value of utilizing these models at full tilt: several messages per minute and at least 500,000 token context windows? What we need is a wikipedia like effort to support something truly open and continually improving in its quality.
- simonw 1y ago
  > I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. I have been building that for a couple of years now: https://llm.datasette.io https://llm.datasette.io
- vunderba 1y ago
  > an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones Fortunately there are many of these that can integrate with offline LLMs through systems like LiteLLM/Ollama/etc. Off the top of my head, I'd look into Continue, Cline and Aider. https://github.com/continuedev/continue https://github.com/continuedev/continue https://github.com/cline/cline https://github.com/cline/cline https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider
- IanCal 1y ago
  > Well, isn't it time we started doing the same with LLMs? I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. Almost all providers and models can be used with the OpenAI api and swapping between them is trivial.
moron4hire 1y ago
They are a little better. Sometimes that little bit is an activation-energy level of difference. But overall, I don't see a huge amount of difference in quality between the open and closed models. Most of the time, it just takes a little more effort to get as good of results out of the open models as the closed ones.

belter 1y ago

The issue is somebody will have to debug and fix what those LLM Leeches made up. I guess then companies will have to hire some 10x Prompters?

muglug 1y ago

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Yet JetBrains has been a business longer than some of my colleagues have been alive, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic/C++/Studio made writing software for Windows much easier, and did not come cheap.

dakiol 1y ago
I see a big difference: I do use Jetbrains IDEs (they are nice), but I can switch to vim (or vscode) any time if I need to (e.g., let's say Jetbrains increase their price to a point that doesn't make sense, or perhaps they introduce a pervasive feature that cannot be disabled). The problem with paid LLMs is that one cannot easily switch to open-source ones (because they are not as good as the paid ones). So, it's a dependency that cannot be avoided, and that's imho something that shouldn't be overlooked.
- eevmanu 1y ago
  Open-weight and open-source LLMs are improving as well. While there will likely always be a gap between closed, proprietary models and open models, at the current pace the capabilities of open models could match today’s closed models within months.
- wepple 1y ago
  Anyone can switch from Claude to llama?
  - dakiol 1y ago
    I don't think so. Let's do a silly experiment: antirez, could you ditch Gemini 2.5 PRO and Claude Opus 4, and instead use llama? Like never again go back to Gemini/Claude. I don't think he can (I don't think he would want to). I this is not on antirez, this is on everyone who's paying for LLMs at the moment: they are paying for them because they are so damn good compared to the open source ones... so there's no incentive to switch. But again, that's like the climate change: there's no incentive to pollute less (well, perhaps to save us, but money is more important).

bgwalter 1y ago

Yes, and what is worse is that the same mega-corporations who have been ostensibly promoting equity until 2025 are now pushing for a gated development environment that costs the same as a monthly rent in some countries or more than a monthly salary in others. That problem does not even include lock-in, surveillance, IP theft and all other things that come with SaaS.

righthand 1y ago

It’s weird that programmers will champion paying for Llm but not ad-free web search.

haiku2077 1y ago
I pay for search and have convinced several of my collaborators to do so as well
- righthand 1y ago
  I think the dev population mostly uses free search, just based on the fact no one has told me to “Kagi it” yet.
  - haiku2077 1y ago
    When I need a facial tissue I ask for a Kleenex even if the box says Puffs. Because who says "pass me the Puffs"?
    - martsa1 1y ago
      I've been curious of that phenomenon, why not juat ask "pass me a tissue?"
      - haiku2077 1y ago
        Cuz all the adults around me called it a Kleenex when I was growing up and I've internalized the word for that kind of tissue is Kleenex
      - righthand 1y ago
        Good old American brand loyalty.
    - righthand 1y ago
      I say “tissue” and “web search” so you’re talking to the wrong guy with that. Even though growing up everyone around me has said Kleenex and Google.

glitchc 1y ago

I'm certain these are advertorials masquerading as personal opinions. These people are being paid to promote the product, either through outright cash, credits on their platform or just swag.

tptacek 1y ago
So, just so I have this straight, you think antirez is being paid by Google to hype Gemini.
- Herring 1y ago
  A lot of people are really bad at change. See: immigration. Short of giving everyone jazz improv lessons at school, there's nothing to be done. To be fair, change is not always good. We still haven't fixed fitness/obesity issues caused (partly) by the invention of the car, 150 years later. I think there's a decent chance LLMs will have the same effect on the brain.
simonw 1y ago
I recommend readjusting your advertorial-detecting radar. antirez isn't taking kickbacks from anyone. I added a "disclosures" section to my own site recently, in case you're interested: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
- amirhirsch 1y ago
  It started out as an innocent kv cache before the redis industrial complex became 5% of the GDP

floucky 1y ago

Why do you see this as a strong dependency? The beauty of it is that you can change the model whenever you want. You can even just code yourself! This isn't some no-code stuff.

asadotzler 1y ago
Change the model, learn how to talk to a new and poorly documented model, and get entirely different results. Yep, easy as pie.

jstummbillig 1y ago

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Since when? It starts with computers, the main tool and it's architecture not being free and goes from there. Major compilers used to not be free. Major IDEs used to not be free. For most things there were decent and (sometimes) superior free alternatives. The same is true for LLMs. > The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. That "excuse" could exactly capture the issue. It does not, because you chose to make it a weirder issue. Just as before: You will be free to either not use LLMs, or use open-source LLMs, or use paid LLMs. Just as before in the many categories that pertain to programming. It all comes at a cost, that you might be willing to pay and somebody else is free to really does not care that much about.

randallsquared 1y ago
> Major compilers used to not be free. Major IDEs used to not be free. There were and are a lot of non-free ones, but since the 1990s, GCC and interpreted languages and Linux and Emacs and Eclipse and a bunch of kinda-IDEs were all free, and now VS Code is one of the highest marketshare IDEs, and those are all free. Also, the most used and learned programming language is JS, which doesn't need compilers in the first place.
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  There are free options and there continue to be non-free options. The same is true for LLMs.
  - vorador 1y ago
    When's the last time you paid for a compiler?
    - jstummbillig 1y ago
      The original point was that there is some inherent tradition in programming being free, with a direct critique wrt LLMs, which apparently breaks that tradition. And my point is that's simply not the case. Different products have always been not free, and continue to be not free. Recent example would be something like Unity, that is not entirely free, but has competitors, which are entirely free and open source. JetBrain is something someone else brought up. Again: You have local LLMs and I have every expectation they will improve. What exactly are we complaining about? That people continue to build products that are not free and, gasp, other people will pay for them, as they always have?

cafp12 1y ago

IMO It's not unlike all other "dev" tools we use at all. There are tons of free and open tools that usually lag a bit behind the paid versions. People pay for jetbrains, for mac os, and even to search the web (google ads). You have very powerful open weight models, they are not the cutting edge. Even those you can't really run locally, so you'd have to pay a 3rd party to run it. Also the competition is awesome to see, these companies are all trying hard to get customers and build the best model and driving prices down, and giving you options. No one company has all of the power, its great to see capitalism working.

mirekrusin 1y ago
You don't pay for macOS, you pay for apple device, operating system is free.
- cafp12 1y ago
  Thanks captain missing the point
  - mirekrusin 1y ago
    You're welcome.
- kgwgk 1y ago
  You do pay for the operating system. And for future upgrades to the operating system. Revenue recognition is a complex and evolving issue.

antirez 1y ago

It’s not that bad: K2 and DeepSeek R1 are at the level of frontier models of one year ago (K2 may be even better: I have enough experience only with V3/R1). We will see more coming since LLMs are incredibly costly to train but very simple in their essence (it’s like if their fundamental mechanic is built in the physical nature of the computation itself) so the barrier to entry is large but not insurmountable.

positron26 1y ago

If the models are getting cheaper, better, and freer even when we use paid ones, then right now is the time to develop techniques, user interfaces, and workflows that become the inspirations and foundations of a future world of small, local, and phenomenally powerful models that have online learning, that can formalize their reason, that can bake deduction into their own weights and code.

kelvinjps10 1y ago

Doesn't already happen with some people being unable to code without Google or similar?

ozgung 1y ago

> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Just like every other subscription model, including the one in the Black Mirror episode, Common People. The value is too good to be true for the price at the beginning. But you become their prisoner in the long run, with increasing prices and degrading quality.

lencastre 1y ago
Can you expand on your argument?
- jordanbeiber 1y ago
  The argument is perhaps ”enshittification”, and that becoming reliant on a specific provider or even set of providers for ”important thing” will become problematic over time.
- x______________ 1y ago
  Not op but a something from a few days ago that might be interesting for you: 259. Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users (techcrunch.com) 395 points by mfiguiere 2 days ago | hide | 249 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44598254
- nico 1y ago
  Currently in the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622953 It isn’t specific to software/subscriptions but there are plenty of examples of quality degradation in the comments
- signa11 1y ago
  enshittification/vendor-lockin/stickiness/… take your pick
- nicce 1y ago
  There is a reason why companies throw billions into AI and still are not profitable. They must be the first ones to hook the users in the long run and make service necessary part of user’s life. And then increase the price.

webappguy 1y ago

I personally can’t wait for programming to ‘die’. It has stolen a decade of my life minimum. Like veterinarians being trained to help pets ultimately finding out a huge portion of the job is killing them. I was not sufficiently informed that I’d spend a decade arguing languages, dealing with thousands of other developers with diverging opinions, legacy code, poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks, etc if you have been in the game at least a decade please don’t @. Adios to programming as it was (happily welcoming a new DIFFERENT reality whatever that means). Nostalgia is for life, not staring at a screen 8hrs a day

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Feel free to change careers and get lost, no one is forcing you to be a programmer. If you feel it is stealing your life, then please feel free to reclaim your life at any time. Leave the programming to those of us who actually want to do it. We don't want you to be a part of it either
- oblio 1y ago
  Don't be rude.
  - __loam 1y ago
    He's being honest, not rude
    - oblio 1y ago
      Honesty doesn't look like this: > [...] get lost [...] > [..] We don't want you to be a part of it either. [...] He's being rude. Honesty would be, something like: > I (and probably many others) like programming a lot. Even if you're frustrated with it, I think a great deal of people will be sad if somehow programming disappeared completely. It might be best for you if you just found a job that you love more, instead. Also the original comment makes a point that's SUPER valid and anyone working as a professional programmer for 10+ years can't really deny: > poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks Most commercial code just sucks due to misaligned incentives. Open Source is better, but not always, as a lot of Open Source code is just commercial code opened up after the fact.

jacooper 1y ago

Kimi k2 exists now.

kelvinjps10 1y ago

LLMS are basically free? Yes you're rate limited but I have just started paying for them now, before I'd bounce around between the providers but still free

jacobr1 1y ago
The most cutting edge-models aren't usually free, at least at first.
- ipaddr 1y ago
  They are good enough for 90% of people and 90% of cases that I would trust an llm for. What advantages are people getting on these new models?

simonw 1y ago

The models I can run locally aren't as good yet, and are way more expensive to operate. Once it becomes economical to run a Claude 4 class model locally you'll see a lot more people doing that. The closest you can get right now might be Kimi K2 on a pair of 512GB Mac Studios, at a cost of about $20,000.

theshrike79 1y ago
This is the thing. I'm waiting for the equivalent of Google Coral[0], but powerful enough for AI workloads. You can plug in the $60 Coral to a Raspberry Pi and get real-time image recognition running in Frigate. When I can have: 1) Something similar inside my computer/laptop 2) Something I can plug in to my computer via USB-C 3) Something I can buy and install to my LAN so all devices in my home can connect to it I'll buy it instantly. What I don't want is a massive generic GPU that just happens to be good at AI workloads, I want custom hardware that's more efficient and cheaper. (Off topic, but my guess is that Apple is aiming for #3 with an Apple TV variant so you can have more power than your phone, but still keep it 100% local) [0] https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/
deleted 1y ago
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QRY 1y ago
Have you considered the Framework Desktop setup they mentioned in their announcement blog post[0]? Just marketing fluff, or is there any merit to it? > The top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration with 128GB of memory starts at just $1999 USD. This is excellent for gaming, but it is a truly wild value proposition for AI workloads. Local AI inference has been heavily restricted to date by the limited memory capacity and high prices of consumer and workstation graphics cards. With Framework Desktop, you can run giant, capable models like Llama 3.3 70B Q6 at real-time conversational speed right on your desk. With USB4 and 5Gbit Ethernet networking, you can connect multiple systems or Mainboards to run even larger models like the full DeepSeek R1 671B. I'm futsing around with setups, but adding up the specs would give 384GB of VRAM and 512GB total memory, at a cost of about $10,000-$12,000. This is all highly dubious napkin math, and I hope to see more experimentation in this space. There's of course the moving target of cloud costs and performance, so analysing break-even time is even more precarious. So if this sort of setup would work, its cost-effectiveness is a mystery to me. [0] https://frame.work/be/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desktop https://frame.work/be/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desk...

Fervicus 1y ago

> I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies.

LeafItAlone 1y ago
You mean the same companies they are hosting their VCS in and providing the infrastructure they deploy their codebases to? All in support of their CRUD application that is in a space with 15 identical competitors? My codebase is not my secret sauce.
- Fervicus 1y ago
  Sure, the codebase itself isn't special. But it's the principle and ethics of it all. These companies trained their models unethically without consequence, and now people are eating up their artificially inflated hype and are lining up to give them money and their data on a silver platter.
  - LeafItAlone 1y ago
    My opinion is that the value to be that I’ve been getting out of these tools in both my personal and professional projects is greater than value that they (and others using the downstream effects of them) get out of having my particular codebases. Also, many of my personal projects are open sourced with pretty permissive licensing, so I’m not all that mad someone else has the code.
geoka9 1y ago
> > I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming > > And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies. And how they don't mind opening up their development machines to agents driven by a black-box program that is run in the cloud by a vendor that itself doesn't completely understand how it works.

fragmede 1y ago

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Not without a lot of hard thankless work by people like RMS to write said tools. Programming for a long while was the purview of Microsoft Visual Studio family, which cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There existed other options, some of which was free, but, as is the case today with LLMs you can run at home, they were often worse. This is why making software developer tools is such a tough market and why debugging remains basically in the dark ages (though there are the occasional bright lights like rr). Good quality tools are expensive, for doctors and mechanics, why do we as software developers expect ours to be free, libre and gratis?

bizzletk 1y ago
Programmers have the ability to write tools that make their jobs/lives easier. This is the perfect alignment of incentives where the person who benefits from the production of a high-quality tool has the ability to deliver one into their hands. And once the tool has been made, many people just give it away for others to benefit from too.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

I rely on these but there's zero loyalty. The moment something better is there, like when Gemini 2.5 Pro showed up, I immediately switch. That's why I drink the whole tools kool-aid. From TFA: > In this historical moment, LLMs are good amplifiers and bad one-man-band workers. That's how I use them: write a function here, explain an error message there. I'm still in control. I don't depend on LLMs: they just amplify. I can pull the plug immediately and I'm still able to code, as I was two years ago. Shall DeepSeek release a free SOTA model? I'll then use that model locally. It's not because I use LLMs that I have a strong dependency on them. Just like I was already using JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA back when many here were still kids (and, yup, it was lightyears better than NetBeans and Eclipse) didn't make me have a strong dependency on JetBrains tools. I'm back to Emacs and life is good: JetBrains IDEs didn't make me forget how to code, just as LLMs won't. They're just throwaway tools and are to be regarded as such.

throw-number9 1y ago

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible .. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Yeah, coding (and to a lesser extent IT in general) at one point was a real meritocracy, where skill mattered more than expensive/unnecessary academic pedigree. Not perfect of course, but real nevertheless. And coders were the first engineers who really said "I won't be renting a suit for an interview, I think an old t-shirt is fine" and we normalized that. Part of this was just uncompromisingly practical.. like you can either do the work or not, and fuck the rest of that noise. But there was also a pretty punk aspect to this for many people in the industry.. some recognition that needing to have money to make money was a bullshit relic of closeted classism. But we're fast approaching a time where both the old metrics (how much quality code are you writing how fast and what's your personal open source portfolio like?) and the new metrics (are you writing a blog post every week about your experience with the new models, is your personal computer fast enough to even try to run crappy local models?) are both going to favor those with plenty of money to experiment. It's not hard to see how this will make inequality worse and disadvantage junior devs, or just talented people that didn't plan other life-events around purchasing API credits/GPUs. A pay-to-play kind of world was ugly enough in politics and business so it sucks a lot to see it creeping into engineering disciplines but it seems inevitable. If paying for tokens/GPU ever allows you to purchase work or promotion by proxy, we're right back to this type of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the_British_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...

LeafItAlone 1y ago

>I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM As of now, I’m seeing no lock-in for any LLM. With tools like Aider, Cursor, etc., you can swim on a whim. And with Aider, I do. That’s what I currently don’t get in terms of investment. Companies (in many instances, VCs) are spending billions of dollars and tomorrow someone else eats their lunch. They are going to need to determine that method of lock-in at some point, but I don’t see it happening with the way I use the tools.

jerrygenser 1y ago
They can lock in by subsidizing the price of you use their tool, while making the default price larger for wrappers. This can draw people from the wrapper that can support multiple models to the specific CLI that supports the proprietary model.
- aseipp 1y ago
  Anthropic or Google offering a product and having margins they leverage is not "lock in" when there are dozens of alternatives at many various price points, including ones that can be run entirely locally (at high capex cost). It's like market fact #0 that, today, there is very little moat here other than capital, which is why OpenAI has now got multiple viable competitors despite their head start. Their APIs get copied, their tools get copied, the only way they remain competitive is with huge investments back into the core product to retain their leads. This is just what a competitive market looks like right now, and these offerings exist exactly because of downward pressure from other forces. The goal is of course to squeeze other players as much as possible, but these products have not yet proven to be sticky enough for their mere existence to do that. And there are many other players who have a lot of incentive to keep that downward pressure applied. What you're describing is really just called "Offering a product for sale" and yes typically the people doing it will do, say, and offer things that encourage using their product over the competitors. That isn't "lock in" in any sense of the word. What are they supposed to do? Say "Our shit sucks and isn't price effective compared to others and we bring nothing to the table?" while giving you stuff for free?
- 1y ago

rapind 1y ago

Not an issue and I'll tell you why. If the gains plateau, then there's really no need to make productivity sacrifices here for the societal good, because there's so much competition, and various levels of open models that aren't far behind, that there will be no reason to stick with a hostile and expensive service unless it's tooling stays leaps ahead of the competition. If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways, and will need to pivot to... something? So I sympathize, but pragmatically I don't think there's much point in stressing it. I also suspect the plateau is coming and that the stock of these big players is massively overvalued.

worldsayshi 1y ago
> If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways I think there's room for more nuance here. It could also be a situation of diminishing returns but not a sharp plateau. That could favour the big players. I think I find that scenario most likely, at least in between major breakthroughs.
- rapind 1y ago
  Well diminishing returns will have the same effect as a plateau. If you're on a log with your (much cheaper, Chinese) competition, then your advantage is very quickly microscopic.
  - cutemonster 1y ago
    Can't AIs plateau at a prohibitively hight cost, so only the biggest companies can build the really good ones. Search engine tech isn't that much of a secret nowadays? Still it's prohibitively expensive for almost everyone to build a competitive search engine. What if really good AI turns out to be more like that (both training and inference)
    - rapind 1y ago
      The issue with launching a search engine company is probably mind share more than anything else. Once Google was a verb, it was pretty locked in. Even so, there are alternatives that some people use and find superior, like Kagi and DDG. Now you're seeing a lot of people who just use ChatGPT instead of google for their searches. For AI, I think that ship has sailed already. OpenAI is the closest to dominance, but not currently the best at all tasks (claude and gemini for some tasks), and everyone else is nipping at their heels, followed by open / cheap models anywhere from 6 months to 1 year behind. Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, all evidence points to it becoming a commodity (or utility), similar to cloud computing. For example AWS is pretty dominant in the cloud computing space, but the differences aren't really that big of a deal for most people and there are services that will extract the cloud for you as a generic services layer. Like OpenRouter does for AI models. Is AWS really better than other cloud providers? Maybe, in some situations, with some requirements, but it's definitely not the general rule. Their focus since the beginning has been layering value on top of this base cloud offering (I'd argue to the point where there are so many services it's confusing AF), and I think it's the same with AI providers. It's even the same players for a lot of it (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure all offer AI services).

20k 1y ago

+1, I use exclusively free tools for this exact reason. I've been using the same tools for 15 years now (GCC + IDE), and they work great There is a 0% chance that I'm going to subscribe to being able to program, because its actively a terrible idea. You have to be very naïve to think that any of these companies are still going to be around and supporting your tools in 10-20 years time, so if you get proficient with them you're absolutely screwed I've seen people say that AI agents are great because instead of using git directly, they can ask their AI agent to do it. Which would be fine if it was a free tool, but you're subscribing to the ability to even start and maintain projects A lot of people are about to learn an extremely blunt lesson about capitalism

moron4hire 1y ago
A lot of people's problems with Git would go away if they just took a weekend and "read the docs." It's shocking how resistant most people are to the idea of studying to improve their craft. I've been spending time with my team, just a few hours a week, on training them on foundational things, vs every other team in the company just plodding along, trying to do things the same way they always have, which already wasn't working. It's gotten to where my small team of 4 is getting called in to clean up after these much larger teams fail to deliver. I'm pretty proud of my little junior devs.
- haskellshill 1y ago
  This is a reply to an old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44452679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44452679 (since I cannot reply in the original thread) > Even assuming python's foreach loop in these cases get optimized down to a very bare for loop, the operations being performed are dominated by the looping logic itself, because the loop body is so simple. > Each iteration of a for loop performs one index update and one termination comparison. For a simple body that is just an XOR, that's the difference between performing 5 operations (update, exit check, read array, XOR with value, XOR with index) per N elements in the one loop case versus 7 operations (update, exit, read array, XOR with value, then update, exit, XOR with index) in the two loop case. So we're looking at a 29% savings in operations. > It gets worse if the looping structure does not optimize to a raw, most basic for loop and instead constructs some kind of lazy collection iterator generalized for all kinds of collections it could iterate over. > The smaller the loop body, the higher the gains from optimizing the looping construct itself. Let's test your claims import random import time n = int(1e7) A = list(range(1,n+1)) random.shuffle(A) print("Removed:", A.pop()) t = time.time() result = 0 for idx,val in enumerate(A): result ^= idx+1 result ^= val result ^= n print("1-loop:", time.time() - t) print("Missing:", result) t = time.time() result = 0 for value in range(1, n + 1): result ^= value for value in A: result ^= value print("2-loop:", time.time() - t) print("Missing:", result) A sample run gives: Removed: 2878763 1-loop: 1.4764018058776855 Missing: 2878763 2-loop: 1.1730067729949951 Missing: 2878763 And after swapping the order of the code blocks just to ensure there's nothing strange going on: Removed: 3217501 2-loop: 1.200080156326294 Missing: 3217501 1-loop: 1.5053350925445557 Missing: 3217501 So indeed we have about a 20% speedup, only in the complete opposite direction that you claimed we'd have. Perhaps it's best not to assume when talking about performance.

jonas21 1y ago

How is it a strong dependency? If Claude were to disappear tomorrow, you could just switch to Gemini. If all proprietary LLMs were to disappear tomorrow (I don't know how that would happen, but let's suppose for the sake of argument), then you switch to free LLMs, or even just go back to doing everything by hand. There's very little barrier to switching models if you have to.

overgard 1y ago

I think it's an unlikely future. What I think is more likely is people will realize that every line of code written is, to an extent, a liability, and generating massive amounts of sloppy insecure poorly performing code is a massive liability. That's not to say that AI's will go away, obviously, but I think when the hype dies down and people get more accustomed to what these things can and can't do well we'll have a more nuanced view of where these things should be applied. I suppose what's still not obvious to me is what happens if the investment money dries up. OpenAI and Anthropic, as far as I know, aren't anywhere near profitable and they require record breaking amounts of capital to come in just to sustain what they have. If what we currently see is the limit of what LLM's and other generative techniques can do, then I can't see that capital seeing a good return on its investment. If that's the case, I wonder if when the bubble bursts these things become massively more expensive to use, or get taken out of products entirely. (I won't be sad to see all the invasive Copilot buttons disappear..)

kossae 1y ago
The point on investment is apt. Even if they achieve twice as much as they’re able to today (some doubts amongst experts here), when the VC funding dries up we’ve seen what happens. It’s time to pay the piper. The prices rise to Enterprise-plan amounts, and companies start making much more real ROI decisions on these tools past the hype bubble. Will be interesting to see how that angle plays out. I’m no denier nor booster, but in the capitalist society these things inevitably balance out.
- MoreQARespect 1y ago
  The same thing happened with the first internet bubble. It didnt prevent the rise of the internet it just meant some players who, for instance, overinvested in infrastructure ended up taking an L while other players bought up their overbuilt assets for a song and capitalized upon it later.

paulddraper 1y ago

And you thought Visual Studio was free? Or Windows? Or an Apple Developer License? There are free/free-ish, options, but there have always been paid tools.

asadotzler 1y ago
Paid tools were rarely monthly subscriptions without which you could not produce code or executables. Further, I can write and compile an application for Mac, Windows, or Linux with entirely free tools including tools provided directly by Apple and Microsoft. This discussion is about is a monthly subscription, without which, most up and coming coders, certainly "vibe coders," are completely dead in the water. These two dependencies are not the same. If that's not obvious to you, I don't know what else to say to that.
- paulddraper 1y ago
  You can write code with free tools.

sneak 1y ago

Strong dependency? I can still code without LLMs, just an order of magnitude slower. There is no dependency at all.

deleted 1y ago
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wahnfrieden 1y ago
The dependency arises from rising productivity expectations from employers and the market. A cabbie is still dependent on the car if they can still drive a horse buggy and order of magnitude slower. You are only not dependent if you are not doing this professionally and can enjoy the leisure of tending to your horses.

ls-a 1y ago

Programming on/for Apple has never been free. So it's not a surprise to some engineers. You're right that programming might become the way of Apple in the future. However, I think engineers should rejoice because AI is the best thing that happened to them.

asadotzler 1y ago
I paid ~$600 for my first Windows compiler, over a grand in today's money. But I didn't have to keep paying every month forever to be able to code at all. Take Claude or whatever away from a vibe coder and they're completely dead in the water. Apple's fee is like that Visual Studio purchase I made, a fee that lets me compile for their platforms. It's not a subscription without which I can't code anything at all. Creating a new dependency on monthly subscriptions to unsustainable companies or products is a huge step away from accessible programming of the last 50 years and one that should not so casually be dismissed.

vitaflo 1y ago

Most people who develop software expect other people to pay for it. That's why devs make six figures. Yet devs want everything for free to create the software they charge money for? That's a bit hypocritical.

dcre 1y ago

To be pedantic, I think it’s too late for a product with close to a billion monthly active users to be “normalized.”

firecall 1y ago

A big issue will be if we see a further decline in SDK and API documentation. Anecdotally, I recently find myself building a simple enough Android app for a client based on an iOS app I have already built. I don’t really know Android dev, but know enough to get started having patched an App somewhat recently. So started from scratch and having heard that the Android SDK had something similar to SwiftUI that’s what I went for. In building the App I have found that Gemini is far more useful than Googles own documentation and tutorials. The tutorials for basic things like NavBars is just wrong in places, maybe due to being outdated. I’ve reported issues using the feedback tool. But still….

Aurornis 1y ago

> but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming. I don’t understand how people consider this a strong dependency. Changing LLMs is trivial. Some times I’ll switch between LLMs on a whim to experiment. I can close one coding agent app and open another in seconds. These claims about vendor lock-in and strong dependencies seem to mostly be coming from people watching from a distance, not the people on the ground using these tools.

zaptheimpaler 1y ago

Where is the strong dependency? I can point Cursor at Openrouter and use any LLM I want, from multiple providers. Every LLM provider supports the same OpenAI completions API. I wish the stuff on top - deep research modes, multimodal, voice etc. had a more unified API as well but there's very little lock-in right now.

atleastoptimal 1y ago

The advantage of having smarter models is greater than the risk/harm of them being closed source, especially so when speed of execution is a major factor.

hahahal 1y ago

> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4 What I thought you were going to say is “Gemini- wha?”. I’ve used Gemini 2.5 PRO and would definitely not use it for most of my coding tasks. Yes, it’s better at hard things, but it’s not great at normal things. I’ve not used Claude 4 Opus yet- I know it’s great at large context- but Claude 4 Sonnet Thinking is mostly good unless the task is too complex, and Claude 4 Sonnet is good for basic operations in 1-2 files- beyond that it’s challenged and makes awful mistakes.

dinkumthinkum 1y ago

If you are so tied to an LLM that you cannot program without one then you are not a programmer. It is not the same as with an IDE or whatever, those are essentially ergonomic and do not speak to your actual competence. This will probably be an unpopular take but its just reality.

nominallyfree 1y ago

Us FORTH and LISP hackers will be doing free range code forever. We can use cheap hardware that can be fixed with soldering irons and oscilloscopes. People said for decades our projects just become weird DSLs. And now whatever little thing I want to do in any mainstream language involves learning some weird library DSL. And now people be needing 24h GPU farm access to handle code. In 50 years my grandkids that wish to will be able to build, repair and program computers with a garage workbench and old wrinkled books. I know most of the software economy will end up in the hands of major corporations capable of paying through the nose for black box low code solutions. Doesn't matter. Knowledge will set you free if you know where to look.

edanm 1y ago

> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Why? If I want to pick up many hobbies, not to mention lines of professional work, I have to pay for tools. Why is programming any different? Why should it be? Complaining that tools that improve your life cost money is... weird, IMO. What's the alternative? A world in which people gift you life-and-work-improving tools for free? For no reason? That doesn't exist. > Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. Btw, I think this was actually less true in the past. Compilers used to cost money in the 70s/80s. I think it's actually cyclical - most likely tools will cost money today, but then down the line, things will start getting cheaper again until they're free.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
> Btw, I think this was actually less true in the past. Compilers used to cost money in the 70s/80s. I think it's actually cyclical - most likely tools will cost money today, but then down the line, things will start getting cheaper again until they're free. I don't see it as an inevitable cycle. Free tools (gcc, emacs) and OS (Linux) came about as idealistic efforts driven by hobbyists, with no profit goal/expectation, then improved as large companies moved to support them out self-interest. Companies like RedHat have then managed to make a business model out of selling support for free software. Free LLMs or other AI-based tools are only going to happen where there are similar altruistic and/or commercial interests at play, and of course the dynamics are very different given the massive development costs of LLMs. It's not a given that SOTA free tools will emerge unless it is the interest of some deep-pocketed entity to make that happen. Perhaps Meta will develop and release SOTA models, but then someone would have to host them which is also expensive. What would the incentive be for someone to host them for free or at-cost?

blackoil 1y ago

That's a code time dependency which is of least concern. That's like saying how can a company hire a developer, they are now having a dependency. Code written will continue to run, you can use alternate LLM to further write code. Unless you are a pure vibe coder, you can still type the code. IF programmer stop learning how to write code, that's on them and not Claude's or antirez responsibility. We are using best tool available to us, right now it is Claude Code, tomorrow it may be something from OpenAI, Meta or Deepseek.

PeterStuer 1y ago

I share uour concerns absolutely, and would run an open model local (or self hosted), but for now the reality is that what is available as such is not satisfactory compared to the closed frontier models only available through SaaS. I hope this will change before (captured) regulation strangles open models.

dirkc 1y ago

I've personally felt this way about many proprietary tech ecosystems in the past. Still do. I don't want to invest my energy to learn something if the carpet can be pulled from under my feet. And it does happen. But that is my personal value judgement. And it doesn't mean other people will think the same. Luckily tech is a big space.

KronisLV 1y ago

The software is largely there: you can run Ollama, vLLM or whatever else you please today. The models are somewhat getting there: even the smaller ones like Qwen3-30B-A3B and Devstral-23B are okay for some use cases and can run decently fast. They’re not amazing, but better than much larger models a year or two ago. The hardware is absolutely not there: most development laptops will be too weak to run a bunch of tools, IDEs and local services alongside a LLM and will struggle to do everything at the pace of those cloud services. Even if you seek compromise and get a pair of Nvidia L4 cards or something similar and put them on a server somewhere, the aforementioned Qwen3-30B-A3B will run at around 60 tokens/second for a single query but slow down as you throw a bunch of developers at it that all need chat and autocomplete. The smaller Devstral model will more than halve the performance at the starting point because it’s dense. Tools like GitHub Copilot allow an Ollama connection pretty easily, Continue.dev also does but can be a bit buggy (their VS Code implementation is better than their JetBrains one), whereas the likes of RooCode only seem viable with cloud models cause they generate large system prompts and need more performance than you can squeeze out of somewhat modest hardware. That said, with more MoE models and better training, things seem hopeful. Just look at the recent ERNIE-4.5 release, their model is a bit smaller than Qwen3 but has largely comparable benchmark results. Those Intel Arc Pro B60 cards can’t come soon enough. Someone needs to at least provide a passable alternative to Nvidia, nothing more.

stingraycharles 1y ago
And models like Qwen3 really don’t match the quality of Opus 4 and Gemini-Pro 2.5. And even if you manage to get your hands on 512GB of GPU RAM, it will be slow. There’s simply so much going on under the hood at these LLM providers that are very hard to replicate locally.
- justatdotin 1y ago
  its impossible to catch up; but there is still much fertile and prospective territory within reach
amelius 1y ago
Didn't Karpathy, in his latest talk, say something along the lines of: don't bother with less capable models, they are just a waste of time.

smokel 1y ago

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. This was largely not the case before 2000, and may not be the case after, say 2030. It may well be that we are living in extraordinary times. Before 2000 one had to buy expensive compilers and hardware to do serious programming. The rise of the commercial internet has made desktop computers cheaper, and the free software movement (again mostly by means of commercial companies enjoying the benefits) has made a lot of free software available. However, we now have mostly smartphones, and serious security risks to deal with.

michaelbuckbee 1y ago

Genuine question as I don't understand the deeper aspects of this, but is it possible that we will see AI specific hardware in the future that will make local AI's more possible? My general thinking is that we're using graphics processors which _work_ but aren't really designed for AI (lack of memory, etc.).

irthomasthomas 1y ago

Kimi K2 competes with these. Even beats them in some evals.