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Comment by brunoborges | Hacker News Reader

> I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.

> Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".

Still highly dependant on one's access to SOTA AI models (availability and funding). Most people praising LLMs publicly for this sort of use case, are the ones with unlimited access to tokens / AI credits, or simply with a lot of money to burn.

But reality is that between using one's limited employer-sponsored quota of tokens to do their 9-5 business logic coding maintenance job, versus exploring 3rd-party software as end-users, I am sure of which one their managers will prefer.

I believe it will eventually happen, whether with SOTA local models on highly capable local hardware, or super cheap inference APIs... or both.

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I've gone back and forth on this.

A couple of years ago LLM prompts really were incredibly cheap and falling in price. OpenAI's own models had fallen in cost by a factor of about 1000x since GPT-3.

They were also cheap because many of the things you might want to do with an LLM took in the order of a few thousands tokens, at most.

Then coding agents happened, and suddenly we had a reason to burn 100,000s or even millions of tokens on a single task. Stuff got expensive!

(Classic Jevon's paradox right there.)

It feels to me like that's trending back down again though. DeepSeek and Kimi are massively less expensive than OpenAI and Anthropic, and almost as useful.

OpenAI dropped the price of Luna by 80% the other day, and it's proving very capable of exploring codebases and generating quite competent code.

So I don't think advanced AI that can help debug and maintain software will stay out of the reach of most people for very long.

> So I don't think advanced AI that can help debug and maintain software will stay out of the reach of most people for very long.

But then what stops the upstream tools from doing exactly the same thing and getting the same speedups? I've certainly seen AI become a huge boon in my debugging experience for random user reports for example.

FWIW if we are talking about hyper personalized software like the OP, it's going to quickly go beyond "debug and maintain" and towards bigger issues like UX, ergonomics, features etc. And at that point, if the upstream is also being developed you will have differences between your personal visions and upstream

Is the answer at that point "accept whatever AI does"? That to me seems to clash with the entire premise of hyper-personalization which is where your vision is what matters not the AI's. Do you really want to get into the game of having opinions on design of every tool you use forever?

> Do you really want to get into the game of having opinions on design of every tool you use forever?

Yeap. Most users want someone else to think for them. Not just "something" (AI). Having a vision on what works best (design) is still, for the time being, a human task IMO.

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