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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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