Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

> Gemini 2.5 PRO | Claude Opus 4

Whether it's vibe coding, agentic coding, or copy pasting from the web interface to your editor, it's still sad to see the normalization of private (i.e., paid) LLM models. I like the progress that LLMs introduce and I see them as a powerful tool, but I cannot understand how programmers (whether complete nobodies or popular figures) dont mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming. Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible (as in most programmers will be so tied to a paid LLM, that not using them would be like not using an IDE or vim nowadays), since everyone is using private LLMs. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.

I personally can’t wait for programming to ‘die’. It has stolen a decade of my life minimum. Like veterinarians being trained to help pets ultimately finding out a huge portion of the job is killing them. I was not sufficiently informed that I’d spend a decade arguing languages, dealing with thousands of other developers with diverging opinions, legacy code, poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks, etc if you have been in the game at least a decade please don’t @. Adios to programming as it was (happily welcoming a new DIFFERENT reality whatever that means). Nostalgia is for life, not staring at a screen 8hrs a day