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Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

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Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#161

Post by nico »

lencastre wrote: post #131
ozgung wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Just like every other subscription model, including the one in the Black Mirror episode, Common People. The value is too good to be true for the price at the beginning. But you become their prisoner in the long run, with increasing prices and degrading quality.

Can you expand on your argument?

Currently in the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44622953

It isn’t specific to software/subscriptions but there are plenty of examples of quality degradation in the comments

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#162

Post by signa11 »

lencastre wrote: post #131
ozgung wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here. Just like every other subscription model, including the one in the Black Mirror episode, Common People. The value is too good to be true for the price at the beginning. But you become their prisoner in the long run, with increasing prices and degrading quality.

Can you expand on your argument?

enshittification/vendor-lockin/stickiness/… take your pick

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#163

Post by hsuduebc2 »

webappguy wrote: post #134
dakiol wrote: post #25

> 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 part…

I personally can’t wait for programming to ‘die’. It has stolen a decade of my life minimum. Like veterinarians being trained to help pets ultimately finding out a huge portion of the job is killing them. I was not sufficiently informed that I’d spend a decade arguing languages, dealing with thousands of other developers with diverging opinions, legacy code, poorly if at all maintained libraries, tools, frameworks, e…

Did you expect computer programming not to involve this much time at a computer screen? Most modern jobs especially in tech do. If it’s no longer fulfilling, it might be worth exploring a different role or field instead of waiting for the entire profession to change.

I understand your frustration but the problem is mostly people. Not the particular skill itself.

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#164

Post by Fervicus »

dakiol wrote: post #25

> 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 part…

> I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming

And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies.

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#165

Post by mumbisChungo »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #125
Cheer2171 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software jobs pay more than artist jobs because coding builds things. You can still be a code artist on your own time. Nobody is stopping you from writing in assembler.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people didn't stop playing chess because computers were better at it than them

And chess players stream as their primary income, because there's no money in Chess unless you're exactly the best player in the world (and even then the money is coming from sponsors/partners, not from chess itself).

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#166

Post by layer8 »

dakiol wrote: post #39
muglug wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> because they are not as good as the paid ones

The alternative is to restrict yourself to “not as good” ones already now.

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#167

Post by Arainach »

dakiol wrote: post #43
azan_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. That would at least allow us to switch to a free and opensource version if the companies behind the private LLMs go rogue. I'm afraid tho that wouldn't be enough, but it's a starting point. There are open source tools that do exactly that already.

Ah, well that's nice. But every single post I read don't mention them? So, I assume they are not popular for some reason. Again, my main point here is: the normalization of using private LLMs. I don't see anyone talking about it; we are all just handing over a huge part of what it means to build software to a couple of enterprises whose goal is, of course, to maximize profit. So, yeah, perhaps I'm overthinking I don'…

>every single post I read don't mention them

Because the models are so much worse that people aren't using them.

Philosophical battles don't pay the bills and for most of us they aren't fun.

There have been periods of my life where I stubbornly persisted using something inferior for various reasons - maybe I was passionate about it, maybe I wanted it to exist and was willing to spend my time debugging and offer feedback - but there a finite number of hours in my life and often I'd much rather pay for something that works well than throw my heart, soul, time, and blood pressure at something that will only give me pain.

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#168

Post by 1024core »

I have found that if I ask the LLM to first _describe_ to me what it wants to do without writing any code, then the subsequent code generated has much higher quality. I will ask for a detailed description of the things it wants to do, give it some feedback and after a couple of iterations, tell it to go ahead and implement it.

Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

#169

Post by skydhash »

rolisz wrote: post #110
dakiol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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…

> 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.

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