51–60 of 76 posts
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.
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 l…
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.
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 before the extinction level meteor hit Ohio, there were tiny meteors hitting Earth all the time, it wasn't that safe either".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thro…
that is literally what this article is about, how returning to that is a bad thing
None of the arguments demonstrate even accidentally that there is LESS knowledge or fewer options.
This is the least locked in period and the better AI gets it will be an option to be even less locked in because you can just build and run everything yourself on your own hardware
Literally anyone can run the equivalent of an entire datacenter from 2000 on a handful of retired servers and old laptops at this point.
Today, you can get an entry level sub for Claude Code or Codex for about $20/month... and while that may be really expensive in some parts of the world, it's not nearly as bad as a single state of the art compiler or dev tools in the early 90's over the course of a year or two until the next version came out. Let alone something like an MSDN subscription.
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.
You can't get that level of depth with an LLM... because you generally won't be digging in... for that matter, if you're vibe coding, you're even further removed from the details of how things are being done for better or worse.
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.