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dakiol ◴[] No.44625484[source]
> 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.

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muglug ◴[] No.44625564[source]
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Yet JetBrains has been a business longer than some of my colleagues have been alive, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic/C++/Studio made writing software for Windows much easier, and did not come cheap.

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dakiol ◴[] No.44625619[source]
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.
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1. jacobr1 ◴[] No.44627639[source]
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.