It still is free. No one is forcing anyone to use LLMs to learn to code.
Yes but we could be transitioning from a time when the best tools are free to a time when they decidedly aren't.
Programming Used to Be Free
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#32Traveling 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.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#33Even 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.
I'm not sure how true that is. There was copious free information on the internet to learn about coding.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#34Programming 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.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
...that require fairly expensive computers.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#36Programming 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.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Along with distribution costs for information going to near zero.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#38Programming 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.
The article covers this.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#39An 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.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#40We 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.