I’m reasonably convinced this is the best argument against LLMs. It’s the same reason Open is in OpenAI’s name. The understanding that centralizing the ownership of these tools is going to transform the world is widespread. That’s why the investment is so high. If power and wealth isn’t concentrated into these AI labs the investment isn’t worth it. Which means we have to ask ourselves if we want that. There’s plenty of futures which include LLMs and don’t include the centralization but they require a departure from our current trajectory. There was also no guarantee that programming and computing would become free like it is today.
I don't know, there used to be IDE vendors that sold stuff to enterprises and offered freebies for educational purposes. Down the line there will be free offerings by the established players as well as OSS models you can run locally. Right now this is of course not enjoyable on existing hardware that a middle schooler might be using, put a bit more RAM into the MacBook Neo and this might change.
An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.
I know what you're thinking — when the calculator came about, being forced to compute in your head wasn't an advantage. But LLMs are different: a calculator is a strictly improved substitute for mental arithmetic, whereas an LLM is only an approximate solution — and it is far from clear whether LLMs will ever become a perfect solution, given the nuanced challenges around context management, interpreting intent, etc.
> An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.
This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes into AI and vibecoding and I'm not a big fan. Even in my boring job the actual coding is the part I like the most. So I've taken a different tack. I've been prompting Claude to teach me how to do things, and that has worked out really well. Some basic info to start with, specific questions as needed, but I'm doing the work. I'm improving my productivity while still learning new things and having fun. Win-win for me.
Programming is free if you do not consider price of your time. If you consider it, it is much higher than AI-associated costs. And even with AI-associated costs, it is still much cheaper than most other engineering professions, where physical realization is orders of magnitude more costly.
LLM providers are interested in maximizing their profits, not minimizing your costs. The eventual goal of the providers, and the reason that they have trillion-dollar valuations, is because the objective is to capture the market and then increase the price to capture the value of any time you may be saving by using them. In other words, if your time savings amounts to $100 per hour by using LLMs, their goal is to eventually charge you $99.99 per hour for the privilege of using them.
So far it still seems like it still is, but I think we will shortly have a lot of convoluted and very sparsely informational code that will be a PITA to read as a human.
I'm already reading a ton of LLM generated code by less skilled developers and understanding and reviewing it requires a paranoid attention to detail of the reader that I think you probably lack if these tools to generate large chunks of code seems like a good option to you at all.
Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?
> Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?
Perhaps my installation didn't include it, or maybe you're confusing it with QuickBASIC, a more feature-complete IDE with a compiler (instead of just an interpreter). I don't exactly remember.
Tangentially related: the author of the blog is listening to LukHash. I remember the guys absolutely stunning cover of C-64 Bruce Lee theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUHewyaavys
We programers have been depending on a centralized compute resources for much longer than LLMs.
For one, imagine having to discover StackExchange without Google search. Sure, those were gratis, but I'm not so sure programming was ever as free as the author says.
I also learned programming on QBASIC around the same time frame, but in my case it was mostly because all the old 90's computers were getting thrown away at that time, so there were plenty of parts around for a kid to learn about computers without breaking anything expensive.
It was pretty easy back then to find software that would work on those machines on the internet, too. I'm not so sure it would be as easy for young people to learn using yesterday's computers today.
Even back in the day you had to buy programming books and courses if you wanted to learn how to make the best code. That wasn't free. It's really not all that different from LLMs, you can code without them, but they're a good resource to help you when you're stuck. There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc. you don't need money or a subscription to vibe code.
This is directly addressed by the author and part of the post? Tools were very expensive until gcc etc., and the internet made excellent free guides available.
And prior to the desktop computer, you had to actually go work at a laboratory in order to do any programming whatsoever, which required significant amounts of educational and social access
What’s the point?
Writing deploying and delivering software has never been as accessible as it has ever been
Much like the author I learned on my own too and with a lot less help because I didn’t have a parent even guiding me through it
There are those who started playing with computers when compilers were often more expensive than the computer they ran on, and those who came after you could download an entire "Unix" system and toolchain for free.
Entire industries and massive companies existed for tools and tooling that is now considered free and table-stakes. Heck, an operating system used to cost money and didn't come with much at all!
You can still write code without LLMs, much like you can write code without modern IDEs, or use C and assembly instead of higher-level languages. But there are significant differences between the skills you learn in the process, which I believe inhibits upward mobility.
I was fortunate to grow up when the internet was full of free learning resources, but there was a time just before that when you really did need physical books to get beyond the basics.
I remember talking to people a couple decades older than me and being confused when they talked about having to buy compilers, too.
Traveling used to be free. You could walk, run or swim anywhere you wanted. Now these cars and airplanes are ruining travel, they are expensive and hard to maintain. You have to buy tickets from vendors and the experience is completely different than walking.
i know you're joking, but it is an interesting parallel to draw. consider how roads often make walking unsafe, infeasible, or even overtly illegal. and consider the externalities of automotive culture.
This is a big part of why I'm looking to develop a local LLM capability: having the hardware is a good start, but also developing the understanding on what the SoTA of local edge models can do, so we're not crippled if remote models stop being served, or at least some risk management.
It doesn't solve the problem of general LLM dependency (at the end of the day we gotta keep our brains sharp), but any LLM-based workflows aren't all of a sudden put at risk if we set up something that depends on it.
In fact when in "learning" mode you probably shouldn't use an LLM. Same reason why you don't immediately jump to a calculator when learning multiplication. Yes LLMs are more powerful than a calc, but at least you could have arrived at the same/similar result manually if you wanted to spend the time
I struggle to understand the "hackers" in HN vouching for proprietary LLMs. Like we have so much so good open source software that is top notch like linux, git, postgres, http, tcp/ip, and a long etc., and now we have these billionaires trying to make us use LLMs for coding at a hefty price.
I understand it from people like PG and the like, but real hackers? C'mon people
This depends on your definitions of "free" and "programming". Can you afford a PC? Can you afford internet to access documentation? A lot of people can't. Likewise, what is "programming" to you? Hello World in Python? Or fixing a driver bug in the Linux kernel? Those are worlds apart in terms of hardware requirements just to complete the build.
It's not ahistoric. Going back to the bad old days of forbiddingly high costs to developer tooling (not to mention the hardware needed to run it) would be a societal regression. Imagine needing a subscription to use a programming language in 2026, you'd be laughed out of the room. That's the world that the LLM providers are trying to drag us back to.
I’m reasonably convinced this is the best argument against LLMs. It’s the same reason Open is in OpenAI’s name. The understanding that centralizing the ownership of these tools is going to transform the world is widespread. That’s why the investment is so high. If power and wealth isn’t concentrated into these AI labs the investment isn’t worth it. Which means we have to ask ourselves if we want that. There’s plenty of futures which include LLMs and don’t include the centralization but they require a departure from our current trajectory. There was also no guarantee that programming and computing would become free like it is today.
I don't know, there used to be IDE vendors that sold stuff to enterprises and offered freebies for educational purposes. Down the line there will be free offerings by the established players as well as OSS models you can run locally. Right now this is of course not enjoyable on existing hardware that a middle schooler might be using, put a bit more RAM into the MacBook Neo and this might change.
An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.
I know what you're thinking — when the calculator came about, being forced to compute in your head wasn't an advantage. But LLMs are different: a calculator is a strictly improved substitute for mental arithmetic, whereas an LLM is only an approximate solution — and it is far from clear whether LLMs will ever become a perfect solution, given the nuanced challenges around context management, interpreting intent, etc.
> An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.
This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes into AI and vibecoding and I'm not a big fan. Even in my boring job the actual coding is the part I like the most. So I've taken a different tack. I've been prompting Claude to teach me how to do things, and that has worked out really well. Some basic info to start with, specific questions as needed, but I'm doing the work. I'm improving my productivity while still learning new things and having fun. Win-win for me.
Programming is free if you do not consider price of your time. If you consider it, it is much higher than AI-associated costs. And even with AI-associated costs, it is still much cheaper than most other engineering professions, where physical realization is orders of magnitude more costly.
Well of course. The article is about the author's experience of being a young person with no money but plenty of time.
This is exactly the kind of person that could be excluded by a programming culture that requires extensive use of LLMs.
LLM providers are interested in maximizing their profits, not minimizing your costs. The eventual goal of the providers, and the reason that they have trillion-dollar valuations, is because the objective is to capture the market and then increase the price to capture the value of any time you may be saving by using them. In other words, if your time savings amounts to $100 per hour by using LLMs, their goal is to eventually charge you $99.99 per hour for the privilege of using them.
So far it still seems like it still is, but I think we will shortly have a lot of convoluted and very sparsely informational code that will be a PITA to read as a human.
I'm already reading a ton of LLM generated code by less skilled developers and understanding and reviewing it requires a paranoid attention to detail of the reader that I think you probably lack if these tools to generate large chunks of code seems like a good option to you at all.
Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?
> Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?
Perhaps my installation didn't include it, or maybe you're confusing it with QuickBASIC, a more feature-complete IDE with a compiler (instead of just an interpreter). I don't exactly remember.
Tangentially related: the author of the blog is listening to LukHash. I remember the guys absolutely stunning cover of C-64 Bruce Lee theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUHewyaavys
Whoah. How have I not run across this yet?!
Thanks for sharing.
Programming wasn't really that free and LLMs just continue that trend of giving some feelings of freedom while trading off other freedoms
Lots of people use locked down proprietary softwares and even GNU licenses have been criticized for being locked down
There are primitivist critiques of technology in general that show how technological systems require very restrictive global industrial systems
Pre-LLM eras had me hunting all over for poorly documented solutions to common problems, with vast amounts of limitations on what was possible
We programers have been depending on a centralized compute resources for much longer than LLMs.
For one, imagine having to discover StackExchange without Google search. Sure, those were gratis, but I'm not so sure programming was ever as free as the author says.
I also learned programming on QBASIC around the same time frame, but in my case it was mostly because all the old 90's computers were getting thrown away at that time, so there were plenty of parts around for a kid to learn about computers without breaking anything expensive.
It was pretty easy back then to find software that would work on those machines on the internet, too. I'm not so sure it would be as easy for young people to learn using yesterday's computers today.
Sitting down for the first time to QBASIC after years of Apple ][ BASIC, my first thought was a gleeful ‘No line numbers!’
If I remember correctly, it even came with a utility to remove line numbers for you
And then the second thought was panic: "But how am I going to use GOTO?!"
Even back in the day you had to buy programming books and courses if you wanted to learn how to make the best code. That wasn't free. It's really not all that different from LLMs, you can code without them, but they're a good resource to help you when you're stuck. There's a billion free LLMs you can use, Grok, duck.ai, etc. you don't need money or a subscription to vibe code.
>Even back in the day you had to buy programming books and courses if you wanted to learn how to make the best code. That wasn't free
"Even before the extinction level meteor hit Ohio, there were tiny meteors hitting Earth all the time, it wasn't that safe either".
This is directly addressed by the author and part of the post? Tools were very expensive until gcc etc., and the internet made excellent free guides available.
and there are free models available. and free ways to run them...
they also addressed this and talked about how competitive models can't run on the weaker hardware most people have
And prior to the desktop computer, you had to actually go work at a laboratory in order to do any programming whatsoever, which required significant amounts of educational and social access
What’s the point?
Writing deploying and delivering software has never been as accessible as it has ever been
Much like the author I learned on my own too and with a lot less help because I didn’t have a parent even guiding me through it
that is literally what this article is about, how returning to that is a bad thing
...that require fairly expensive computers.
Well, way back in the day, dev tools weren't free, either, for the most part.
In the 80s, a good compiler would cost several hundred dollars. Relentless competition pushed the prices down to zero.
There are those who started playing with computers when compilers were often more expensive than the computer they ran on, and those who came after you could download an entire "Unix" system and toolchain for free.
Entire industries and massive companies existed for tools and tooling that is now considered free and table-stakes. Heck, an operating system used to cost money and didn't come with much at all!
Along with distribution costs for information going to near zero.
You can still write code without LLMs, much like you can write code without modern IDEs, or use C and assembly instead of higher-level languages. But there are significant differences between the skills you learn in the process, which I believe inhibits upward mobility.
I'm not sure how true that is. There was copious free information on the internet to learn about coding.
I was fortunate to grow up when the internet was full of free learning resources, but there was a time just before that when you really did need physical books to get beyond the basics.
I remember talking to people a couple decades older than me and being confused when they talked about having to buy compilers, too.
Traveling used to be free. You could walk, run or swim anywhere you wanted. Now these cars and airplanes are ruining travel, they are expensive and hard to maintain. You have to buy tickets from vendors and the experience is completely different than walking.
i know you're joking, but it is an interesting parallel to draw. consider how roads often make walking unsafe, infeasible, or even overtly illegal. and consider the externalities of automotive culture.
This, but with people constantly asking you why you’re cycling to work when cars are the future.
You need to go back thousands of years to find a time when all traveling was walking, running or swimming.
But it was free!
This is a big part of why I'm looking to develop a local LLM capability: having the hardware is a good start, but also developing the understanding on what the SoTA of local edge models can do, so we're not crippled if remote models stop being served, or at least some risk management.
It doesn't solve the problem of general LLM dependency (at the end of the day we gotta keep our brains sharp), but any LLM-based workflows aren't all of a sudden put at risk if we set up something that depends on it.
It still is free. No one is forcing anyone to use LLMs to learn to code.
In fact when in "learning" mode you probably shouldn't use an LLM. Same reason why you don't immediately jump to a calculator when learning multiplication. Yes LLMs are more powerful than a calc, but at least you could have arrived at the same/similar result manually if you wanted to spend the time
When LLM skills become the bottleneck, you kind of need to use an LLM to learn how to use LLM workflows effectively
Getting the most out of LLM tooling is a real skill that needs practice just like any other
No one is "forcing" you to drive a car to get to work, either. You could walk 20 miles if you live somewhere without decent public transit.
My view is that the author is talking about having a knowledge of career-relevant skills, developed for free.
If you can't develop the skills to be competitive in an interview without using LLMs, then you are forced by societal factors to use the LLMs.
was it developed for free? he has a computer, which i'm assuming he paid for. and you can run LLMs locally. and those will catch up eventually.
there has always been a moat, with varying levels of depth. do you have electricity? do you have a computer? can you afford internet?
Yes but we could be transitioning from a time when the best tools are free to a time when they decidedly aren't.
I struggle to understand the "hackers" in HN vouching for proprietary LLMs. Like we have so much so good open source software that is top notch like linux, git, postgres, http, tcp/ip, and a long etc., and now we have these billionaires trying to make us use LLMs for coding at a hefty price.
I understand it from people like PG and the like, but real hackers? C'mon people
This depends on your definitions of "free" and "programming". Can you afford a PC? Can you afford internet to access documentation? A lot of people can't. Likewise, what is "programming" to you? Hello World in Python? Or fixing a driver bug in the Linux kernel? Those are worlds apart in terms of hardware requirements just to complete the build.
Nothing in life is free.
Programming is freer, faster, more shared, and has more corporate sponsorship than ever before.
You think it was always this easy to find high quality docs and packages written by others for free?
Yep, this is ahistoric. You used to have to pay for your compiler, not to mention a useable IDE.
I've been doing this almost 40 years and have never had to pay for either.
Now, if you don't find gcc and neither of vi (and later vim) or emacs usable, well, let's not go there.
And the tools, they just keep getting better. Now I have both clang and gcc, and so many wayy-cool vim plugins to choose from.
I still pay for good hardware, but thanks to Linus and his ilk, I barely need to do that anymore.
The article covers this.
It's not ahistoric. Going back to the bad old days of forbiddingly high costs to developer tooling (not to mention the hardware needed to run it) would be a societal regression. Imagine needing a subscription to use a programming language in 2026, you'd be laughed out of the room. That's the world that the LLM providers are trying to drag us back to.
LLMs aren't programming.