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.

Not an issue and I'll tell you why.

If the gains plateau, then there's really no need to make productivity sacrifices here for the societal good, because there's so much competition, and various levels of open models that aren't far behind, that there will be no reason to stick with a hostile and expensive service unless it's tooling stays leaps ahead of the competition.

If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways, and will need to pivot to... something?

So I sympathize, but pragmatically I don't think there's much point in stressing it. I also suspect the plateau is coming and that the stock of these big players is massively overvalued.

> If the gains don't plateau, well then we're obsolete anyways

I think there's room for more nuance here. It could also be a situation of diminishing returns but not a sharp plateau. That could favour the big players. I think I find that scenario most likely, at least in between major breakthroughs.

Well diminishing returns will have the same effect as a plateau. If you're on a log with your (much cheaper, Chinese) competition, then your advantage is very quickly microscopic.

Can't AIs plateau at a prohibitively hight cost, so only the biggest companies can build the really good ones.

Search engine tech isn't that much of a secret nowadays? Still it's prohibitively expensive for almost everyone to build a competitive search engine. What if really good AI turns out to be more like that (both training and inference)

The issue with launching a search engine company is probably mind share more than anything else. Once Google was a verb, it was pretty locked in. Even so, there are alternatives that some people use and find superior, like Kagi and DDG. Now you're seeing a lot of people who just use ChatGPT instead of google for their searches.

For AI, I think that ship has sailed already. OpenAI is the closest to dominance, but not currently the best at all tasks (claude and gemini for some tasks), and everyone else is nipping at their heels, followed by open / cheap models anywhere from 6 months to 1 year behind. Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, all evidence points to it becoming a commodity (or utility), similar to cloud computing.

For example AWS is pretty dominant in the cloud computing space, but the differences aren't really that big of a deal for most people and there are services that will extract the cloud for you as a generic services layer. Like OpenRouter does for AI models. Is AWS really better than other cloud providers? Maybe, in some situations, with some requirements, but it's definitely not the general rule. Their focus since the beginning has been layering value on top of this base cloud offering (I'd argue to the point where there are so many services it's confusing AF), and I think it's the same with AI providers. It's even the same players for a lot of it (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure all offer AI services).