Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

I see a big difference: I do use Jetbrains IDEs (they are nice), but I can switch to vim (or vscode) any time if I need to (e.g., let's say Jetbrains increase their price to a point that doesn't make sense, or perhaps they introduce a pervasive feature that cannot be disabled). The problem with paid LLMs is that one cannot easily switch to open-source ones (because they are not as good as the paid ones). So, it's a dependency that cannot be avoided, and that's imho something that shouldn't be overlooked.

Anyone can switch from Claude to llama?

Open-weight and open-source LLMs are improving as well. While there will likely always be a gap between closed, proprietary models and open models, at the current pace the capabilities of open models could match today’s closed models within months.

People who understand the importance of this choice but still opt for closed source software are the worst of the worst.

You won’t be able to switch to a meaningful vim if you channel your support to closed source software, not for long.

Best to put money where the mouth is.

I don't think so. Let's do a silly experiment: antirez, could you ditch Gemini 2.5 PRO and Claude Opus 4, and instead use llama? Like never again go back to Gemini/Claude. I don't think he can (I don't think he would want to). I this is not on antirez, this is on everyone who's paying for LLMs at the moment: they are paying for them because they are so damn good compared to the open source ones... so there's no incentive to switch. But again, that's like the climate change: there's no incentive to pollute less (well, perhaps to save us, but money is more important).

I don't contribute to vim precisely, but I do contribute to other open source projects. So, I do like to keep this balance between making open source tools better over time and using paid alternatives. I don't think that's possible tho with LLMs at the moment (and I dont think it would be possible in the future, but ofc i could be wrong).

I was a hardcore vim user 10 years ago, but now I just use PyCharm to work. I'm paid to solve problems, not to futz around with vim configs.

Can you make vim work roughly the same way? Probably you can get pretty close. But how many hours do I have to sink into the config? A lot. And suddenly the PyCharm license is cheap.

And it's exactly the same thing with LLMs. You want hand crafted beautiful code, untainted by AI? You can still do that. But I'm paid to solve problems. I can solve them faster/solve more of them? I get more money.

> because they are not as good as the paid ones

The alternative is to restrict yourself to “not as good” ones already now.

> I was a hardcore vim user 10 years ago, but now I just use PyCharm to work. I'm paid to solve problems, not to futz around with vim configs.

The reason I don't like those arguments is that they merge two orthogonal stuff: Solving problems and optimizing your tooling. You can optimize PyCharm just as much you can fiddle with Vim's config. And people are solving with problems with Vim just as you do with an IDE. It's just a matter of preference.

In my day job, I have two IDEs, VSCode, and Emacs open. I prefer Emacs to edit and git usage, but there's a few things that only the IDEs can do (as in I don't bother setting emacs to do the same), and VSCode is there because people get dizzy with the way I switch buffers in Emacs.

Seems the same to me. If you are using the llm as a tool to build your product (rather than a dependency within it for functionality) you can easily switch to a different model, or IDE/Agentic-coder in the same way you can switch between vim and emacs. It might be a `worse` experience for you or have fewer feature, but you aren't locked in, other than in the sense of your preference for productivity. In fact in seems likely to mee that the tools I'll be using a year from now are going to be different than today - and almost certainly a different model will be leading. For example google surprised everyone with the quality of 2.5.

>The reason I don't like those arguments is that they merge two orthogonal stuff: Solving problems and optimizing your tooling. You can optimize PyCharm just as much you can fiddle with Vim's config.

But you’re ignoring that the “optimizing tooling” is for the goal of making it easier for you. Its spending time now to decrease time spent in the long term.

I spent over a decade with Emacs as my sole editor and have since spent over a decade with PyCharm. Day 1 of PyCharm already had practically everything that it took a decade to get working for Emacs, and more. It was pre-optimized for me, so I was able to spend more time working on my code. Did I need to spend time optimizing Emacs? No. But doing so added intellisense and the ability to jump around the codebase very quickly. You _can_ spend just as much time optimizing Emacs, but I didn’t _have_ to in order to get the same result. Or have I spent that much time optimizing it since, for even more functionality.

Emacs is not a python oriented IDE. So the comparison is moot from the beginning. Some people likes what Emacs offers and mesh it with external tools. Some prefers a more complete package. Nothing wrong with either, especially if you have the time and the knowledge to iterate quicly on the first.

What you may need is something others can do without. So what’s best is always subjective.

Indeed. I've been a vim user for almost two decades, and it's been a long, long time since I"ve had to spend time solving problems/optimizing my tooling. Yes it was a big up front investment, but it's paid off immensely. I don't think I'm anything special so please don't misunderstand this as a brag, but I routinely have people enjoy "watching" me use vim because I can fly around the codebase with lightning speed, often times I can have already followed code paths through several files before VS code is even loaded and ready to work on my coworkers machine. The only problem is for whatever reason if I know somebody is watching, I sometimes get stage fright and forget how to use vim for a few seconds at at time :-D

Until you’ve run a big open-source project you won’t quite understand how much time and energy it can eat up. All that effort won’t feed your family.

> The problem with paid LLMs is that one cannot easily switch to open-source ones (because they are not as good as the paid ones). So, it's a dependency that cannot be avoided

How is that any different than JetBrains versus vim?

Calling LLMs a strong dependency or a lock-in also doesn’t make sense. It’s so easy to switch LLMs or even toggle between them within something like Copilot.

You can also just not use them and write the code manually, which is something you still do in any non-trivial app.

I don’t understand all of these people talking about strong dependencies or vendor lock in, unless those comments are coming from people who haven’t actually used the tools?

Yes, PyCharm has settings, but I've barely touched them. In 99% of the cases, the out of the box experience just works. Can't exactly say that about vim (or emacs).

What kind of crappy machines do your coworkers have? VS code takes 2-3 seconds at most for me to load.

If I may ask, why didn't you just use any available emacs config with python support? There are plenty on github, and ofc there's doom emacs, spacemacs, and probably others.

I can tell you in my case it was because I did want to play with emacs and get my hands dirty. But that does shift the blame to me since it's hardly fair to blame emacs for being so extensible and fun.

I did. I’ve done that and tried them all (granted this was a decade+ ago where the landscape was probably different). But there were all lacking full IDE features like what PyCharm gave me.

Sure.

I think it’s odd for you to criticize someone’s reasons when you apparently just reject their underlying premise to begin with (which is, effectively, my experience with a particular open source tool isn’t the best for me and the one I found that does isn’t open source).

Frankly, the idea of having 4 different ways of editing code, as you’ve described above, just seems like a nightmare to me. I like to have one tool that does it all and learn to use that tool well. The Jetbrains tooling allows me to do this with little of my time spent configuring it.

If what you are using works well for you, then I think we should all be happy here.

They mostly have macbooks (I think either M1 or M2?). I don't know if they are loaded with extensions or something that adds time to it, but it definitely takes longer than 2-3 seconds

The point I was making was against conflating optimizing tooling and wasting time not solving problems. Not about going with an IDE or not.

Everyone works differently. For most tasks, I prefer Emacs. But for pairing, VS code may be more familiar to others. And it’s hard to get rid of Android Studio and XCode if you’re doing mobile development.

No one can judge workflow and tooling choices as long as the results are in.