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Comment by mickael-kerjean | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for

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There are plenty of free models available; many that rival their paid counterparts.

A kid interested in trying stuff can use Qwen Coder for free [1].

If the kid's school has Apple Silicon Macs (or iPads), this fall, each one of them will have Apple's 3 billion parameter Foundation Models available to them for free [2].

Swift Playground [3] is a free download; Apple has an entire curriculum for schools. I would expect an upgrade to incorporate access to the on-board LLM

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder:free

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286

[3]: https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/

I guess hardware being able to run a local model will eventually get cheap enough, but for a lot of people even buying an Apple device or something with a good enough GPU is prohibitive.

True, it will get cheap to run today's frontier models. But, by that time, how much more advanced will the frontier models of that time be.

It is a real question. It all depends on whether the AI future is linear or exponential.

I think we are already there. You can run a pretty ok LLM on a 4gb raspberry pi that will write most any simple 20-150 line bash script today, or toy application in python/rust. Old laptops pulled out of the trash are probably capable of running smaller LLMs and can explain how functions work. They're no claude code but you probably want a rough-around-the-edges LLM that can't do everything for you, if you're planning on using it to learn to code.

Speaking of free models on OpenRouter, DeepSeek R1 0528 is also available for free.

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528:free

Swift and swift playground might be a good introduction to programming, but it feels likely not to lead to as many opportunities as a more popular system. And I don’t just mean job opportunities.

"Already being paid for by someone else" is very different than "free."

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