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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

#211

Post by cheeze »

QRY wrote: post #193
simonw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you considered the Framework Desktop setup they mentioned in their announcement blog post[0]? Just marketing fluff, or is there any merit to it? > The top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration with 128GB of memory starts at just $1999 USD. This is excellent for gaming, but it is a truly wild value proposition for AI workloads. Local AI inference has been heavily restricted to date by the limited memory capacity an…

I love Framework but it's still not enough IMO. My time is the most valuable thing, and a subscription to $paid_llm_of_choice is _cheap_ relative to my time spent working.

In my experience, something Llama 3.3 works really well for smaller tasks. For "I'm lazy and want to provide minimal prompting for you to build a tool similar to what is in this software package already", paid LLMs are king.

If anything, I think the best approach for free LLMs would be to run using rented GPU capacity. I feel bad knowing that I have a 4070ti super that sits idle for 95% of the time. I'd rather share an a1000 with bunch of folks and have that run at close to max utilization.

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

#212

Post by esafak »

zer00eyz wrote: post #202
simonw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Once it becomes economical to run a Claude 4 class model locally you'll see a lot more people doing that. Historically these sorts of things happened because of Moores law. Moores law is dead. For a while we have scaled on the back of "more cores", and process shrink. It looks like we hit the wall again. We seem to be near the limit of scaling (physics) we're not seeing a lot in clock (some but not enough), and IPC…

Model efficiency is outpacing Moore's law. That's what DeepSeek V3 was about. It's just we're simultaneously finding ways to use increase model capacity, and that's growing even faster...

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

#213

Post by smallerize »

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.

I don't have to actually run it locally to remove lock-in. Several cloud providers offer full DeepSeek R1 or Kimi K2 for $2-3/million output tokens.

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

#215

Post by rapind »

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…

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.

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

#217

Post by lettergram »

Contrary to this post, I think the AI agents, particularly the online interface of OpenAI's Codex to be a massive help.

One example, I had a PR up that was being reviewed by a colleague. I was driving home from vacation when I saw the 3-4 comments come in. I read them when we stopped for gas, went to OpenAI / codex on my phone, dictated what I needed and made it PR to my branch. Then got back on the road & PR'd it. My colleague saw the PR, agreed and merged it in.

I think of it as having a ton of interns, the AI is about the same quality. It can help to have them, but they often get stuck, need guidance, etc. If you treat the AI like an intern and explain what you need it can often produce good results; just be prepared to fallback to coding quickly.

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

#218

Post by Fervicus »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #203
Fervicus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You mean the same companies they are hosting their VCS in and providing the infrastructure they deploy their codebases to? All in support of their CRUD application that is in a space with 15 identical competitors? My codebase is not my secret sauce.

Sure, the codebase itself isn't special. But it's the principle and ethics of it all. These companies trained their models unethically without consequence, and now people are eating up their artificially inflated hype and are lining up to give them money and their data on a silver platter.

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

#219

Post by mleo »

zer00eyz wrote: post #202
simonw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Once it becomes economical to run a Claude 4 class model locally you'll see a lot more people doing that. Historically these sorts of things happened because of Moores law. Moores law is dead. For a while we have scaled on the back of "more cores", and process shrink. It looks like we hit the wall again. We seem to be near the limit of scaling (physics) we're not seeing a lot in clock (some but not enough), and IPC…

Why wouldn’t 3rd party hardware vendors continue to work on reducing costs of running models locally? If there is a market opportunity for someone to make money, it will be filled. Just because the cloud vendors don’t develop hardware someone will. Apple has vested interest in making hardware to run better models locally, for example.

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

#220

Post by 20k »

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…

+1, I use exclusively free tools for this exact reason. I've been using the same tools for 15 years now (GCC + IDE), and they work great

There is a 0% chance that I'm going to subscribe to being able to program, because its actively a terrible idea. You have to be very naïve to think that any of these companies are still going to be around and supporting your tools in 10-20 years time, so if you get proficient with them you're absolutely screwed

I've seen people say that AI agents are great because instead of using git directly, they can ask their AI agent to do it. Which would be fine if it was a free tool, but you're subscribing to the ability to even start and maintain projects

A lot of people are about to learn an extremely blunt lesson about capitalism

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