Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

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.

Not without a lot of hard thankless work by people like RMS to write said tools. Programming for a long while was the purview of Microsoft Visual Studio family, which cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There existed other options, some of which was free, but, as is the case today with LLMs you can run at home, they were often worse.

This is why making software developer tools is such a tough market and why debugging remains basically in the dark ages (though there are the occasional bright lights like rr). Good quality tools are expensive, for doctors and mechanics, why do we as software developers expect ours to be free, libre and gratis?