Hacker News Reader

Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

> people had to wait overnight to continue vibe coding because vendors blocked further API calls for many hours at a time

Tangential but this is funny. Back in the early 90s, I did a lot of BASIC programming in the family computer, this was before we had Internet. I could spend hours.and hours in front of the computer doing stuff.

Fast forward to around 2010 I remember a distinct feeling one time the internet went off at home. Sitting in front of the computer and feeling that it was "useless" because it wasn't connected to the net.

We are getting to that point in coding apparently: 5-10 years ago, everyone programmed just by typing commands, looking at S.O. and thinking. Now, if we open our "IDE" and it doesn't have access to The Brain, we are left just standing there looking in awe at the machine.

Sign of the times...

View on HN

dunno, I have electricity problems (especially on winters when Russia strikes the hardest on infra) but I usually have this time as a downtime for lightweight C coding in Termux and retro gaming, all on Galaxy Note 8 (Android 9!!) + power bank.

I guess it feels less like a problem when you have that problem regularly and are forced to adapt. and I guess I'll just HAVE to switch to Pixel 10 when Pixel 11 comes out - the integrated Linux terminal right there is awesome. or maybe just get a MacBook like most around me did

I keep going back to Sublime Text when everything in VS Code becomes too much. Last time I looked at Sublime, I was like “Damn, the last update was from 2024? Must be dead.” Until I realized the lack of updates was because it was fully functional for what they wanted as is without connecting to the internet at all.

It isn't just a psychological feeling though. We've (unnecessarily) offloaded everything to the net, so there's a very real element of uselessness that kicks in when there's no connection.

E.g. back when you were coding BASIC, you probably had magazines and either ended up copying a lot of code by hand, or if you were lucky the mag came with a floppy disk. Now no such magazines exist. Manpages were all local, now it's readthedocs online. Fat local-friendly standard libraries in almost all languages have been modularised and package managers for the most part expect to install stuff by fetching it from the net.

So unless you have heavily prepared for the cyberapocalypse or sth, there really is not much you can do on your machine when the internet goes down.

On the other hand, however, when you can prepare in advance, it's great to shut off the net for a while. I do my most productive coding during flights, for example.

Yeah, I also feel that this negative aspect of "AI" adoption is not much discussed overall - massive centralization and dependency on a remote service woth something as important as computer programming.

To be fair, there are plenty of local models you can run. Seems surprising that in 5-10 years those models wouldn't match state of the art today.

gotta wait for your turn to use The Brain

Reply on news.ycombinator.com