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There was a lovely window of a few years when processors were fast enough and low-power enough that real development work could trivially happen on a Macbook Ai

There was a lovely window of a few years when processors were fast enough and low-power enough that real development work could trivially happen on a Macbook Air in a lounge. That window is waning as more and more memory and graphics processing power is being used locally. I suppose the future is most likely going to involve farming out AI requests to your desktop machine, your company's compute farm, or a cloud endpoint, but if you're expecting to run an AI offline on your lap with a battery...your lap will get warm.

dmitrygr 1mo ago
No idea what you are talking about. My battery lasts longer than ever while running vim and make and GCC. It’s amazing. Not sure why your windows are closing.
- pmontra 1mo ago
  Because the local LLM, which you are not running, is running for much longer than gcc and is eating the battery. Different choices, different outcomes.
  - adastra22 1mo ago
    So don’t run a local LLM?
  - alibarber 1mo ago
    Bur the implication here in the parent comment is that for ‘real dev work’ to be done you must be running an LLM, and therefore you can’t do it on a MacBook anymore. Turns out you can still accomplish stuff with a text editor and compiler.
    - pmontra 1mo ago
      Of course we can code without a LLM, but if we want to, as the sibling comment says, don't run a local LLM on a laptop. I'm offloading the LLM to the LLM vendor, like most of us IMO. The CPU is still busier then it used to be, because of the local harness.
  - dmitrygr 1mo ago
    > There was a lovely window of a few years when processors were fast enough and low-power enough that real development work could trivially happen on a Macbook Air in a lounge. I was responding to this. I am appalled that anyone thinks (and is willing to say out loud in public) that they cannot do "real dev work" without an LLM.
b112 1mo ago
I envision a future when the potential energy in a laptop battery, could take out 17 city blocks if it exploes.
LeBit 1mo ago
Running your dev environment on your laptop is so 2025.
- coldtea 1mo ago
  "So 20XX" is so 2012.

dmitrygr 1mo ago

No idea what you are talking about. My battery lasts longer than ever while running vim and make and GCC. It’s amazing. Not sure why your windows are closing.

pmontra 1mo ago
Because the local LLM, which you are not running, is running for much longer than gcc and is eating the battery. Different choices, different outcomes.
- adastra22 1mo ago
  So don’t run a local LLM?
- alibarber 1mo ago
  Bur the implication here in the parent comment is that for ‘real dev work’ to be done you must be running an LLM, and therefore you can’t do it on a MacBook anymore. Turns out you can still accomplish stuff with a text editor and compiler.
  - pmontra 1mo ago
    Of course we can code without a LLM, but if we want to, as the sibling comment says, don't run a local LLM on a laptop. I'm offloading the LLM to the LLM vendor, like most of us IMO. The CPU is still busier then it used to be, because of the local harness.
- dmitrygr 1mo ago
  > There was a lovely window of a few years when processors were fast enough and low-power enough that real development work could trivially happen on a Macbook Air in a lounge. I was responding to this. I am appalled that anyone thinks (and is willing to say out loud in public) that they cannot do "real dev work" without an LLM.

b112 1mo ago

I envision a future when the potential energy in a laptop battery, could take out 17 city blocks if it exploes.

LeBit 1mo ago

Running your dev environment on your laptop is so 2025.

coldtea 1mo ago
"So 20XX" is so 2012.