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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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

llbbdd wrote: post #159
webappguy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You got some arguably rude replies to this but you're right. I've been doing this a long time and the stuff you listed is never the fun part despite some insistence on HN that it somehow is. I love programming as a platonic ideal but those moments are fleeting between the crap you described and I can't wait for it to go.

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by nicce »

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?

There is a reason why companies throw billions into AI and still are not profitable. They must be the first ones to hook the users in the long run and make service necessary part of user’s life. And then increase the price.

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

#174

Post by retsibsi »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #158
jstummbillig wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the past decades knowledge was "locked" behind search engines. Could you have rolled your own search engine indexing the web, to unlock that knowledge? Yes, in the same theoretical way that you can roll your own LLM.

There was never anything stopping you from finding other avenues than Search Engines to get people to find your website. You could find a url on a board at a cafe and still find a website without a search engine. More local sure, but knowledge had ways to spread in the real world when it needed to How are LLMs equivalent? People posting their prompts on bulletin boards at cafes?

But what is (or will be) stopping you from finding avenues other than LLMs? You say other sources of knowledge will be rarer. But they will still exist, and I don't see why they will become less accessible than non-search-engine-indexed content is now.

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

#175

Post by skydhash »

tines wrote: post #153
cratermoon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should also share their prompts and discuss exactly how much effort went into checking the output and re-prompting to get the desired result. The post hints at how much work it takes for the human, "If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you are able to accept the back and forth needed in order to work with LLMs ... you need to provide extensive information to the LLM: papers, big parts of t…

I would assume the argument is that you only need to provide the braindump and extensive information one time (or at least, collect it once, if not upload once) and then you can take your bed of ease as the LLM uses that for many tasks.

The thing is no one writes that much code, at least anyone that cares about code reuse. Mostly the times is spent collecting the information (especially communication with stakeholder), and verifying that the code you wrote didn't break anything.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #141
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…

The models I can run locally aren't as good yet, and are way more expensive to operate. Once it becomes economical to run a Claude 4 class model locally you'll see a lot more people doing that. The closest you can get right now might be Kimi K2 on a pair of 512GB Mac Studios, at a cost of about $20,000.

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by fragmede »

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…

> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Not without a lot of hard thankless work by people like RMS to write said tools. Programming for a long while was the purview of Microsoft Visual Studio family, which cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There existed other options, some of which was free, but, as is the case today with LLMs you can run at home, they were often worse.

This is why making software developer tools is such a tough market and why debugging remains basically in the dark ages (though there are the occasional bright lights like rr). Good quality tools are expensive, for doctors and mechanics, why do we as software developers expect ours to be free, libre and gratis?

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

#178

Post by krupan »

What is the overall feedback loop with LLMs writing code? Do they learn as they go like we do? Do they just learn from reading code on GitHub? If the latter, what happens as less and less code gets written by human experts? Do the LLMs then stagnate in their progress and start to degrade? Kind of like making analog copies of analog copies of analog copies?

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

#179

Post by datastoat »

cratermoon wrote: post #67
airstrike wrote: post #46

I think all conversations about coding with LLMs, vibe coding, etc. need to note the domain and choice of programming language. IMHO those two variables are 10x (maybe 100x) more explanatory than any vibe coding setup one can concoct. Anyone who is befuddled by how the other person {loves, hates} using LLMs to code should ask what kind of problem they are working on and then try to tackle the same problem with AI to…

They should also share their prompts and discuss exactly how much effort went into checking the output and re-prompting to get the desired result. The post hints at how much work it takes for the human, "If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you are able to accept the back and forth needed in order to work with LLMs ... you need to provide extensive information to the LLM: papers, big parts of t…

> They should also share their prompts

Here's a recent ShowHN post (a map view for OneDrive photos), which documents all the LLM prompting that went into it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44584335

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

#180

Post by vunderba »

dakiol wrote: post #37
azan_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paid models are just much, much better.

Of course they are. I wouldn't expect otherwise :) But the price we're paying (and I don't mean money) is very high, imho. We all talk about how good engineers write code that depends on high-level abstractions instead of low-level details, allowing us to replace third party dependencies easily and test our apps more effectively, keeping the core of our domain "pure". Well, isn't it time we started doing the same wit…

> an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones

Fortunately there are many of these that can integrate with offline LLMs through systems like LiteLLM/Ollama/etc. Off the top of my head, I'd look into Continue, Cline and Aider.

https://github.com/continuedev/continue

https://github.com/cline/cline

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

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