Programming Used to Be Free
purplesyringa.moe
purplesyringa.moe
I don't think that's true at all. It's pretty clear that local models are the future of agentic coding, and everyone's been moving towards that goal.
It's also becoming clear that current models are much bigger than they really need to be. New research indicates that most transformer models can be shrunk significantly and still perform the same.
We definitely aren't there yet, but models that run on a single consumer GPU are getting better at a pretty fast pace. Model size keeps going down, efficiency keeps going up, and compute keeps getting faster and cheaper.
I really don't see a future where enormous datacenters are the only way to run a coding agent. Huge models might continue to be more performant, but the gap between that and a local model is closing quick.
Use an LLM with the equivalent knowledge of Linux kernel and tect editor? Or git clone them.
It's another state management scheme being sold to politicians and elder investors who don't know any better. Big tech 100% relies on elder abuse.
programming has always gates... today is no different. arguably, there are quite a lot more free options than there were when i was coming up.
What’s the point?
Writing deploying and delivering software has never been as accessible as it has ever been
Much like the author I learned on my own too and with a lot less help because I didn’t have a parent even guiding me through it
None of the arguments demonstrate even accidentally that there is LESS knowledge or fewer options.
This is the least locked in period and the better AI gets it will be an option to be even less locked in because you can just build and run everything yourself on your own hardware
Literally anyone can run the equivalent of an entire datacenter from 2000 on a handful of retired servers and old laptops at this point.
"Even before the extinction level meteor hit Ohio, there were tiny meteors hitting Earth all the time, it wasn't that safe either".
Entire industries and massive companies existed for tools and tooling that is now considered free and table-stakes. Heck, an operating system used to cost money and didn't come with much at all!
I remember talking to people a couple decades older than me and being confused when they talked about having to buy compilers, too.
This is exactly the kind of person that could be excluded by a programming culture that requires extensive use of LLMs.
You can't get that level of depth with an LLM... because you generally won't be digging in... for that matter, if you're vibe coding, you're even further removed from the details of how things are being done for better or worse.
I know what you're thinking — when the calculator came about, being forced to compute in your head wasn't an advantage. But LLMs are different: a calculator is a strictly improved substitute for mental arithmetic, whereas an LLM is only an approximate solution — and it is far from clear whether LLMs will ever become a perfect solution, given the nuanced challenges around context management, interpreting intent, etc.
While thinking about/working with LLMs, I've been reminded more than once of Asimov's short story Profession (http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...). In it, no one goes to school: information is just dumped into your brain. You get an initial dump of the basics when you're a kid, and then later all the specialty information for your career (which is chosen for you, based on what your brain layout is most suited to).
The protagonist is one of a number of people who can't get the second dump; his brain just isn't wired right, so he's sent to a Home for the Feeble Minded to be with other people who have to learn the old-fashioned way.
Through various adventures he eventually realizes that everyone who was "taped" is incapable of learning new material at all. His Home for the Feeble Minded is in fact an Institute of Higher Studies, one of only a handful, which are responsible for all the invention and creation that sustains human progress.
This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes into AI and vibecoding and I'm not a big fan. Even in my boring job the actual coding is the part I like the most. So I've taken a different tack. I've been prompting Claude to teach me how to do things, and that has worked out really well. Some basic info to start with, specific questions as needed, but I'm doing the work. I'm improving my productivity while still learning new things and having fun. Win-win for me.
At work though, the pressure to move fast is too high, so I'm letting Claude Code so more work these days (nowhere near the majority, but I've found things i can trust it with).
I don't think i could deal with a paid plan myself given how unpredictable the models are and opaque the pricing is.
Once I build a few things at work I'll probably be asking Claude Code to look for problems with what I've written, but we're not being pushed too hard to get into AI coding yet, though the writing is on the wall. I'm mostly looking for ways to expand what I can do within our current constraints, and keep my sanity.
That's great. I don't care how it works, i just want the result for this specific personal project. Great. Whatever i learn about the kernel along the way is just icing.
At work, though, i NEED to know how it works, i need to be able to explain and defend it, i need to be able to expand on it. Sure if Claude Code can speed that up, great, but i can't just "let it rip" the way I might just prompt and pray with a hobby project.
I'm not sure, whether that is true, because when educators want you to learn how to compute you are "locked out" of calculators. You don't get to use a calculator until after you learned basic arithmetic and you won't use a CAS when you are supposed to learn calculus.
Today, you can get an entry level sub for Claude Code or Codex for about $20/month... and while that may be really expensive in some parts of the world, it's not nearly as bad as a single state of the art compiler or dev tools in the early 90's over the course of a year or two until the next version came out. Let alone something like an MSDN subscription.
Microsoft developed numerous variations of BASIC from Altair BASIC, MBASIC, GWBASIC, PDS BASIC, and of course the most well known of them all, Visual Basic.
QBASIC was the only of these that was "free" in the sense that it came bundled as part of the operating system, and never sold as a stand-alone product.
$20/mo for 5 years is over $1000, and you still need hardware on top of that. Vs buying a secondhand computer and using books from the library, it's not cheap.
Thanks for sharing.
For one, imagine having to discover StackExchange without Google search. Sure, those were gratis, but I'm not so sure programming was ever as free as the author says.
I'm already reading a ton of LLM generated code by less skilled developers and understanding and reviewing it requires a paranoid attention to detail of the reader that I think you probably lack if these tools to generate large chunks of code seems like a good option to you at all.
Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?
Perhaps my installation didn't include it, or maybe you're confusing it with QuickBASIC, a more feature-complete IDE with a compiler (instead of just an interpreter). I don't exactly remember.
It was pretty easy back then to find software that would work on those machines on the internet, too. I'm not so sure it would be as easy for young people to learn using yesterday's computers today.
Getting the most out of LLM tooling is a real skill that needs practice just like any other
My view is that the author is talking about having a knowledge of career-relevant skills, developed for free.
If you can't develop the skills to be competitive in an interview without using LLMs, then you are forced by societal factors to use the LLMs.
there has always been a moat, with varying levels of depth. do you have electricity? do you have a computer? can you afford internet?
I understand it from people like PG and the like, but real hackers? C'mon people
Lots of people use locked down proprietary softwares and even GNU licenses have been criticized for being locked down
There are primitivist critiques of technology in general that show how technological systems require very restrictive global industrial systems
Pre-LLM eras had me hunting all over for poorly documented solutions to common problems, with vast amounts of limitations on what was possible
It doesn't solve the problem of general LLM dependency (at the end of the day we gotta keep our brains sharp), but any LLM-based workflows aren't all of a sudden put at risk if we set up something that depends on it.
You think it was always this easy to find high quality docs and packages written by others for free?
Now, if you don't find gcc and neither of vi (and later vim) or emacs usable, well, let's not go there.
And the tools, they just keep getting better. Now I have both clang and gcc, and so many wayy-cool vim plugins to choose from.
I still pay for good hardware, but thanks to Linus and his ilk, I barely need to do that anymore.