6 ms·

Side note, but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription. I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, ins

Side note, but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription. I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection. We're truly building walls everywhere.

dartos 2y ago
Don’t worry. There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere.
- ryang2718 2y ago
  Although, tbf, some libraries are documented better than others. Also, local llms with an agentic tool can be a lot of fun to quickly prototype things. Quality can be hit or miss. Hopefully the work trickles down to local models long-term.
  - guappa 2y ago
    And you think an llm can generate code to use an undocumented library? :D
    - andsoitis 2y ago
      If there are open source projects that use said library, then probably yes.
      - guappa 2y ago
        Unless they are not hosted on github, then no :D
    - 3D30497420 2y ago
      Even documented libraries can be a struggle, especially if they are not particularly popular. I'm doing a project with WiFi/LoRa/MQTT on an ESP32. The WiFi code was fairly decent, but the MQTT and especially LoRa library code was nearly useless.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Of course, why wouldn't it? It's a generative model, not a lookup table. Show it the library headers, and it'll give you decent results. Obviously, if the library or code using it weren't part of the training data, and you don't supply either in the context of your request, then it won't generate valid code for it. But that's not LLM's fault.
      - dartos 2y ago
        > not a lookup table You can imagine the classic attention mechanism as a lookup table, actually. Transformers are layers and layers and layers of lookup tables.
    - kvgr 2y ago
      Sonnet 3.5 fails to generate basic JetpackCompose libraries properties properly. Maybe if somebody tried really hard to scrape all the documentation and force feed it, then it could work. But i don't if there are examples of this. Like general LLM, but with complete Android/Kotlin pushed into it to fix the synapses.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere. That's like saying, there's literally nothing a service business can do for you that you can't do yourself. It's only true in a theoretical sense, if neither time nor resources are a constraint. In such hypothetical universe, you don't need a dentist - you only need to spend 5+ years in medical school + whatever extra it takes to become proficient with tools dentists use + whatever money it takes to buy that equipment. You also don't need accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, or construction companies. You can always learn this stuff and do it yourself better! Truth is, time and attention is finite. Meanwhile, SOTA LLMs are cheap as dirt, they can do pretty much anything that involves text, and do it at the level of a mediocre specialist - i.e. they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in. Not perfect, by no means error-free - just better than you. I feel this still hasn't sunk in for most people.
  - tarkonaut 2y ago
    > they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in Like speaking english and coding?
    - falcor84 2y ago
      I don't know how you compare, but ChatGPT's English grammar and vocabulary are significantly better than mine. And when I prompt it appropriately, it also seems to be a better creative writer than I am, at least for short pieces.
      - dartos 2y ago
        > it also seems to be a better creative writer than I am, at least for short pieces Don’t be so hard on yourself. Chatgpt (and other LLMs) are awful at creative prose.
        ben_w 2y ago
        > Chatgpt (and other LLMs) are awful at creative prose. As are most humans. Don't get me wrong, what I've seen from even the better LLMs have a certain voice and tropes and sacherine worldview that isn't dark enough where it needs to be for the story to work; but on the other hand, what I see on some fiction writing subreddits… the AI is often a genuine improvement over amateur writers, even in cases where the AI contradicts itself about plot elements. Which is frustrating, because I have the feeling the novel I've been trying to finish writing for the last decade may be usurped by AI before I get my final draft.
- JKolios 2y ago
  Even if you absolutely have to use an LLM for some reason, there are already perfectly good LLMs for code generation that you can comfortably run on commodity hardware.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Yeah the deepseek models are actually pretty solid. I use that with avante.vim for tedious refactors. All local.
wilg 2y ago
This is a free tool (though I wouldn't use it since its from Bytedance). Also you could have an AI powered IDE locally without a subscription.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  For now. It’s not clear what the monetisation strategy is, but probably it will be paid in future (alongside whatever other strategies they may have, like selling data, etc)
segmondy 2y ago
No one is forcing you to subscribe. You can code the old fashion way, if you wish to use AI, you can run your own local model.
ardfard 2y ago
VIM and self-hosted ollama for free? Nothing stopping you to build the world you want really.
thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago
I've been coding for around 25 years, I have 3 or so subscriptions to different AI products that I use for coding. It is kind of terrifying that I probably would stop coding for the day if those subscriptions end. (I get far too much convenience out of them) I have tried to rationalize it by the fact that I do pay for internet, and version control, and my peripherals etc
- muixoozie 2y ago
  You should check out openrouter if you haven't already.
  - ioulaum 2y ago
    It's been a little janky for me - usually get better results from directly using a provider's API.
    - muixoozie 2y ago
      Was going to say it's mostly been great for me. At least until recently trying to try out deepseek r1 it's not been great. I can't tell if it's the router or the provider..
wrsh07 2y ago
You can run it all locally: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode
eikenberry 2y ago
You are not alone. The only future for these sorts of AI coding helpers is for them to use 100% free software AIs. On the bright side good progress is being made in that area and the main sticking point seems to be the expensive hardware to run them on (and integration). Costs on that hardware will hopefully drop over time so they won't still be mostly limited to 1st world (like the subscriptions).
- codr7 2y ago
  It will fail epically as always with these morons, let's hope some of us still feel like helping out once the coin drops.
wruza 2y ago
Just get a graphics card and run a prompt-compatible llm yourself. Recent models like phi-4 show decent results (relative to your general amazement baseline) even on medium quantization. I’m running q4_k_m (8gb) with custom “just print and stfu” characters and rarely reach Claude anymore.
Barrin92 2y ago
>but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription I mean you don't need to if you don't want to. I am gainfully employed as a software developer and what I do everyday is literally just fire up Emacs on my Linux machine and write code. To this day I haven't figured out what llms are supposed to do that a bunch of yasnippets don't. Just like five years ago most of my day is reading and debugging code, I'm not limited by how fast I can type.
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  You're definitely limited by how fast you can read and understand.
  - svantana 2y ago
    True, but the jury is still out whether text generators help out with either of those.
    - handfuloflight 2y ago
      The jury which only has you as a member, obviously.
      - joeofbook 2y ago
        [dead]
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      Understand probably not, but they can read bizarrely fast and write a summary of what things do very fast ; maybe not 100% accurately but close enough to be of value when trying to understand a large bag of code fast.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    Is there some alternative, though? Using an LLM might speed up writing code, but obviously can't speed up reading and interpreting it.
ioulaum 2y ago
$20/mo isn't a lot... Especially if you make money with coding.
- guappa 2y ago
  If you pay out of pocket it means it's not an approved tool by your company, which means you can be fired and sued for leaking their intellectual property. Also 20$ per month is way less than what it costs them to run it. Eventually they will need to charge way more to cover their costs, and the people who can't code without an AI assistant will need to pony up :)
  - ioulaum 2y ago
    The coding IDEs at $20/mo do not result in your IP being shared with the AI provider for training. That only applies to regular ChatGPT use. And developers actively using AI for coding can easily spend more than $20/mo for the API. There are people spending $10-15/day in OpenAI API usage working through Cline.
    - guappa 2y ago
      The idea of "do not send proprietary intellectual property to some rando" doesn't even cross your mind uh? I hope your current and future employers never find this side of your personality :D
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      > The coding IDEs at $20/mo do not result in your IP being shared with the AI provider for training. If you’re not running the model locally, you’re sending your code to them for analysis. Now ByteDance has it.
    - elicksaur 2y ago
      It likely doesn’t matter if it is for training in this case. I can’t send our codebase to a friend even if they would never look at it or use it. The issue would be based on the terms of employment and the software license. There’s likely a provision that just says “don’t share” regardless of what the other party will use it for. To OP’s point, if your company is paying for the sub, then sending the codebase data would be an approved use of the codebase as part of your job.
nicman23 2y ago
And you still can. What are you on about.
sdesol 2y ago
> world where coding costs a subscription I think you are approaching this with the wrong mindset. I see it as I'm paying somebody to type and document for me. If you treat LLMs like a power tool, it is very easy to do a cost benefit analysis.
_Algernon_ 2y ago
It doesn't though. You can still code the old fashioned way, and you are even likely to become a better programmer for it. Personally, I tried copilot when I got it for free as a student and it didnt make a difference. The reason I know is that I was coding on two devices, one which had copilot installed the other didnt, and I didnt care enough to install it on the latter through an entire semester. Its just slightly better autocomplete, by a questionable standard of "better".
- redviperpt 2y ago
  I agree with your overall point, but Cursor's autocomplete is significantly betters than copilots.
  - mostlysimilar 2y ago
    Then don't use autocomplete.
pjmlp 2y ago
That is what happens when developers want to be paid for their work, but refuse to pay for the tools they use, regardless of little they may cost. So we're going back to the last century, but given we are in a different computing context, only the stuff that can be gated via digital stores, or Web Services, gets to have a way to force people to pay.
guappa 2y ago
You can still do like that. The problem is that coding was a passion, but turned out to be very lucrative profession so loads of people who can't do it want to do it. This is why we have languages like Go, and AI tools: allow people who don't want to learn how to be developers, to get a job as developers.
- Yasuraka 2y ago
  And here I thought those are all using Python, JS and Ruby.
  - guappa 2y ago
    I don't think anyone's using ruby.
maxehmookau 2y ago
I think that world exists already. I've been paying for JetBrains licences for years because their value is greater than their cost. You can do it without IDEs, nothing is stopping you. I don't think this is a new phenomenon though.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
It's much worse, I doubt they created and published this IDE for profit, they want people's data.
einrealist 2y ago
And a world, where you cannot be sure who has access to your source code (or even to your systems).
barrenko 2y ago
It will be free soon enough.
zild3d 2y ago
> I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection. I'm not understanding what it is about a private company launching a product that changes that?
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  It changes that others aren't going to be learning coding in the same, purist way.
tonyhart7 2y ago
>>"coding costs a subscription." You are free to coding without spend a dime, these AI dev tool cost money because these LLM cost money to run You can get the same experience with open source tools that you can run your own model on your pc
lazycog512 2y ago
This is an age where you can write your own LLM extension. There's no moat, all the clever prompting tricks Cursor et al. are just that - there is no secret sauce besides the model at the other end. Complexity isn't an issue either, have the model write the interface to itself.
ltadeut 2y ago
That's not going away at all though. But I am glad we now have more paid options available. Tooling is important and people that do good work should be able to charge for high quality tools. I would be much happier in a world full of tools licensed like Sublime Text, where I can purchase a license and just run it without the need to constantly phone home though.
twasold 2y ago
Vs code is free. And copilot has a free tier.
knowitnone 2y ago
"install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection." that still works you know. Nobody is forcing you down this subscription path (except Microsoft)
olddog2 2y ago
Use an aggregator like nano-gpt.com. You get access to all the top models (including o1 pro which usually requires a $200/month subscription) on a pay per use rate. Short on cash ? Use deepseek models for .1cents.
mlboss 2y ago
Some AI IDE allow you to use local models. If compute getting cheaper this will become a norm

dartos 2y ago

Don’t worry. There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere.

ryang2718 2y ago
Although, tbf, some libraries are documented better than others. Also, local llms with an agentic tool can be a lot of fun to quickly prototype things. Quality can be hit or miss. Hopefully the work trickles down to local models long-term.
- guappa 2y ago
  And you think an llm can generate code to use an undocumented library? :D
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    If there are open source projects that use said library, then probably yes.
    - guappa 2y ago
      Unless they are not hosted on github, then no :D
  - 3D30497420 2y ago
    Even documented libraries can be a struggle, especially if they are not particularly popular. I'm doing a project with WiFi/LoRa/MQTT on an ESP32. The WiFi code was fairly decent, but the MQTT and especially LoRa library code was nearly useless.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Of course, why wouldn't it? It's a generative model, not a lookup table. Show it the library headers, and it'll give you decent results. Obviously, if the library or code using it weren't part of the training data, and you don't supply either in the context of your request, then it won't generate valid code for it. But that's not LLM's fault.
    - dartos 2y ago
      > not a lookup table You can imagine the classic attention mechanism as a lookup table, actually. Transformers are layers and layers and layers of lookup tables.
  - kvgr 2y ago
    Sonnet 3.5 fails to generate basic JetpackCompose libraries properties properly. Maybe if somebody tried really hard to scrape all the documentation and force feed it, then it could work. But i don't if there are examples of this. Like general LLM, but with complete Android/Kotlin pushed into it to fix the synapses.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere. That's like saying, there's literally nothing a service business can do for you that you can't do yourself. It's only true in a theoretical sense, if neither time nor resources are a constraint. In such hypothetical universe, you don't need a dentist - you only need to spend 5+ years in medical school + whatever extra it takes to become proficient with tools dentists use + whatever money it takes to buy that equipment. You also don't need accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, or construction companies. You can always learn this stuff and do it yourself better! Truth is, time and attention is finite. Meanwhile, SOTA LLMs are cheap as dirt, they can do pretty much anything that involves text, and do it at the level of a mediocre specialist - i.e. they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in. Not perfect, by no means error-free - just better than you. I feel this still hasn't sunk in for most people.
- tarkonaut 2y ago
  > they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in Like speaking english and coding?
  - falcor84 2y ago
    I don't know how you compare, but ChatGPT's English grammar and vocabulary are significantly better than mine. And when I prompt it appropriately, it also seems to be a better creative writer than I am, at least for short pieces.
    - dartos 2y ago
      > it also seems to be a better creative writer than I am, at least for short pieces Don’t be so hard on yourself. Chatgpt (and other LLMs) are awful at creative prose.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > Chatgpt (and other LLMs) are awful at creative prose. As are most humans. Don't get me wrong, what I've seen from even the better LLMs have a certain voice and tropes and sacherine worldview that isn't dark enough where it needs to be for the story to work; but on the other hand, what I see on some fiction writing subreddits… the AI is often a genuine improvement over amateur writers, even in cases where the AI contradicts itself about plot elements. Which is frustrating, because I have the feeling the novel I've been trying to finish writing for the last decade may be usurped by AI before I get my final draft.
JKolios 2y ago
Even if you absolutely have to use an LLM for some reason, there are already perfectly good LLMs for code generation that you can comfortably run on commodity hardware.
- dartos 2y ago
  Yeah the deepseek models are actually pretty solid. I use that with avante.vim for tedious refactors. All local.

wilg 2y ago

This is a free tool (though I wouldn't use it since its from Bytedance). Also you could have an AI powered IDE locally without a subscription.

d1sxeyes 2y ago
For now. It’s not clear what the monetisation strategy is, but probably it will be paid in future (alongside whatever other strategies they may have, like selling data, etc)

segmondy 2y ago

No one is forcing you to subscribe. You can code the old fashion way, if you wish to use AI, you can run your own local model.

ardfard 2y ago

VIM and self-hosted ollama for free? Nothing stopping you to build the world you want really.

thomasfromcdnjs 2y ago

I've been coding for around 25 years, I have 3 or so subscriptions to different AI products that I use for coding. It is kind of terrifying that I probably would stop coding for the day if those subscriptions end. (I get far too much convenience out of them) I have tried to rationalize it by the fact that I do pay for internet, and version control, and my peripherals etc

muixoozie 2y ago
You should check out openrouter if you haven't already.
- ioulaum 2y ago
  It's been a little janky for me - usually get better results from directly using a provider's API.
  - muixoozie 2y ago
    Was going to say it's mostly been great for me. At least until recently trying to try out deepseek r1 it's not been great. I can't tell if it's the router or the provider..

wrsh07 2y ago

You can run it all locally: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode

eikenberry 2y ago

You are not alone. The only future for these sorts of AI coding helpers is for them to use 100% free software AIs. On the bright side good progress is being made in that area and the main sticking point seems to be the expensive hardware to run them on (and integration). Costs on that hardware will hopefully drop over time so they won't still be mostly limited to 1st world (like the subscriptions).

codr7 2y ago
It will fail epically as always with these morons, let's hope some of us still feel like helping out once the coin drops.

wruza 2y ago

Just get a graphics card and run a prompt-compatible llm yourself. Recent models like phi-4 show decent results (relative to your general amazement baseline) even on medium quantization. I’m running q4_k_m (8gb) with custom “just print and stfu” characters and rarely reach Claude anymore.

Barrin92 2y ago

>but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription I mean you don't need to if you don't want to. I am gainfully employed as a software developer and what I do everyday is literally just fire up Emacs on my Linux machine and write code. To this day I haven't figured out what llms are supposed to do that a bunch of yasnippets don't. Just like five years ago most of my day is reading and debugging code, I'm not limited by how fast I can type.

handfuloflight 2y ago
You're definitely limited by how fast you can read and understand.
- svantana 2y ago
  True, but the jury is still out whether text generators help out with either of those.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    The jury which only has you as a member, obviously.
    - joeofbook 2y ago
      [dead]
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    Understand probably not, but they can read bizarrely fast and write a summary of what things do very fast ; maybe not 100% accurately but close enough to be of value when trying to understand a large bag of code fast.
- Gormo 2y ago
  Is there some alternative, though? Using an LLM might speed up writing code, but obviously can't speed up reading and interpreting it.

ioulaum 2y ago

$20/mo isn't a lot... Especially if you make money with coding.

guappa 2y ago
If you pay out of pocket it means it's not an approved tool by your company, which means you can be fired and sued for leaking their intellectual property. Also 20$ per month is way less than what it costs them to run it. Eventually they will need to charge way more to cover their costs, and the people who can't code without an AI assistant will need to pony up :)
- ioulaum 2y ago
  The coding IDEs at $20/mo do not result in your IP being shared with the AI provider for training. That only applies to regular ChatGPT use. And developers actively using AI for coding can easily spend more than $20/mo for the API. There are people spending $10-15/day in OpenAI API usage working through Cline.
  - guappa 2y ago
    The idea of "do not send proprietary intellectual property to some rando" doesn't even cross your mind uh? I hope your current and future employers never find this side of your personality :D
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    > The coding IDEs at $20/mo do not result in your IP being shared with the AI provider for training. If you’re not running the model locally, you’re sending your code to them for analysis. Now ByteDance has it.
  - elicksaur 2y ago
    It likely doesn’t matter if it is for training in this case. I can’t send our codebase to a friend even if they would never look at it or use it. The issue would be based on the terms of employment and the software license. There’s likely a provision that just says “don’t share” regardless of what the other party will use it for. To OP’s point, if your company is paying for the sub, then sending the codebase data would be an approved use of the codebase as part of your job.

nicman23 2y ago

And you still can. What are you on about.

sdesol 2y ago

> world where coding costs a subscription I think you are approaching this with the wrong mindset. I see it as I'm paying somebody to type and document for me. If you treat LLMs like a power tool, it is very easy to do a cost benefit analysis.

_Algernon_ 2y ago

It doesn't though. You can still code the old fashioned way, and you are even likely to become a better programmer for it. Personally, I tried copilot when I got it for free as a student and it didnt make a difference. The reason I know is that I was coding on two devices, one which had copilot installed the other didnt, and I didnt care enough to install it on the latter through an entire semester. Its just slightly better autocomplete, by a questionable standard of "better".

redviperpt 2y ago
I agree with your overall point, but Cursor's autocomplete is significantly betters than copilots.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  Then don't use autocomplete.

pjmlp 2y ago

That is what happens when developers want to be paid for their work, but refuse to pay for the tools they use, regardless of little they may cost. So we're going back to the last century, but given we are in a different computing context, only the stuff that can be gated via digital stores, or Web Services, gets to have a way to force people to pay.

guappa 2y ago

You can still do like that. The problem is that coding was a passion, but turned out to be very lucrative profession so loads of people who can't do it want to do it. This is why we have languages like Go, and AI tools: allow people who don't want to learn how to be developers, to get a job as developers.

Yasuraka 2y ago
And here I thought those are all using Python, JS and Ruby.
- guappa 2y ago
  I don't think anyone's using ruby.

maxehmookau 2y ago

I think that world exists already. I've been paying for JetBrains licences for years because their value is greater than their cost. You can do it without IDEs, nothing is stopping you. I don't think this is a new phenomenon though.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

It's much worse, I doubt they created and published this IDE for profit, they want people's data.

einrealist 2y ago

And a world, where you cannot be sure who has access to your source code (or even to your systems).

barrenko 2y ago

It will be free soon enough.

zild3d 2y ago

> I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection. I'm not understanding what it is about a private company launching a product that changes that?

handfuloflight 2y ago
It changes that others aren't going to be learning coding in the same, purist way.

tonyhart7 2y ago

>>"coding costs a subscription." You are free to coding without spend a dime, these AI dev tool cost money because these LLM cost money to run You can get the same experience with open source tools that you can run your own model on your pc

lazycog512 2y ago

This is an age where you can write your own LLM extension. There's no moat, all the clever prompting tricks Cursor et al. are just that - there is no secret sauce besides the model at the other end. Complexity isn't an issue either, have the model write the interface to itself.

ltadeut 2y ago

That's not going away at all though. But I am glad we now have more paid options available. Tooling is important and people that do good work should be able to charge for high quality tools. I would be much happier in a world full of tools licensed like Sublime Text, where I can purchase a license and just run it without the need to constantly phone home though.

twasold 2y ago

Vs code is free. And copilot has a free tier.

knowitnone 2y ago

"install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection." that still works you know. Nobody is forcing you down this subscription path (except Microsoft)

olddog2 2y ago

Use an aggregator like nano-gpt.com. You get access to all the top models (including o1 pro which usually requires a $200/month subscription) on a pay per use rate. Short on cash ? Use deepseek models for .1cents.

mlboss 2y ago

Some AI IDE allow you to use local models. If compute getting cheaper this will become a norm