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Comment by tnelsond4 | Hacker News Reader

Even back in the day you had to buy programming books and courses if you wanted to learn how to make the best code. That wasn't free. It's really not all that different from LLMs, you can code without them, but they're a good resource to help you when you're stuck. There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc. you don't need money or a subscription to vibe code.

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This is directly addressed by the author and part of the post? Tools were very expensive until gcc etc., and the internet made excellent free guides available.

and there are free models available. and free ways to run them...

they also addressed this and talked about how competitive models can't run on the weaker hardware most people have

And prior to the desktop computer, you had to actually go work at a laboratory in order to do any programming whatsoever, which required significant amounts of educational and social access

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

that is literally what this article is about, how returning to that is a bad thing

But that is not under threat and I’m not sure why people think it is

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.

most of the available services (anthropic, google, openai, xai, deepseek) have a free tier. you can't use it extensively, and have to wait... but its there.

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.

...that require fairly expensive computers.

>Even back in the day you had to buy programming books and courses if you wanted to learn how to make the best code. That wasn't free

"Even before the extinction level meteor hit Ohio, there were tiny meteors hitting Earth all the time, it wasn't that safe either".

You can still write code without LLMs, much like you can write code without modern IDEs, or use C and assembly instead of higher-level languages. But there are significant differences between the skills you learn in the process, which I believe inhibits upward mobility.

Well, way back in the day, dev tools weren't free, either, for the most part.

In the 80s, a good compiler would cost several hundred dollars. Relentless competition pushed the prices down to zero.

There are those who started playing with computers when compilers were often more expensive than the computer they ran on, and those who came after you could download an entire "Unix" system and toolchain for free.

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!

PC-DOS started out at $40. Since the IBM PC cost about $3000, the $40 was more or less free.

Along with distribution costs for information going to near zero.

I'm not sure how true that is. There was copious free information on the internet to learn about coding.

I was fortunate to grow up when the internet was full of free learning resources, but there was a time just before that when you really did need physical books to get beyond the basics.

I remember talking to people a couple decades older than me and being confused when they talked about having to buy compilers, too.

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