That was quick. Just the other day we had "Programming is free"
Programming Used to Be Free
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
and there are free models available. and free ways to run them...
they also addressed this and talked about how competitive models can't run on the weaker hardware most people have
most of the available services (anthropic, google, openai, xai, deepseek) have a free tier. you can't use it extensively, and have to wait... but its there.
programming has always gates... today is no different. arguably, there are quite a lot more free options than there were when i was coming up.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#63One niggle... Basic wasn't really free either. At least not QB45, etc. It's wasn't super expensive, but it wasn't free... Also worth a mention is computers themselves back in the 80's and early 90's costs as much or more than the cars a lot of people were driving at the time. I remember seeing a used XT in 1993 for around $200 or so, which was cheap enough, but state of the art was an 80486 DX2 66... Today, you can g…
This article is specifically about QBASIC, which was bundled with MS-DOS, and by extension Windows up until Windows Me. QuickBASIC is a separate stand-alone application that predates QBASIC. The two certainly shared a lot of similarities, but they were not part of the same product line.
Microsoft developed numerous variations of BASIC from Altair BASIC, MBASIC, GWBASIC, PDS BASIC, and of course the most well known of them all, Visual Basic.
QBASIC was the only of these that was "free" in the sense that it came bundled as part of the operating system, and never sold as a stand-alone product.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#64One niggle... Basic wasn't really free either. At least not QB45, etc. It's wasn't super expensive, but it wasn't free... Also worth a mention is computers themselves back in the 80's and early 90's costs as much or more than the cars a lot of people were driving at the time. I remember seeing a used XT in 1993 for around $200 or so, which was cheap enough, but state of the art was an 80486 DX2 66... Today, you can g…
This article is specifically about QBASIC, which was bundled with MS-DOS, and by extension Windows up until Windows Me. QuickBASIC is a separate stand-alone application that predates QBASIC. The two certainly shared a lot of similarities, but they were not part of the same product line. Microsoft developed numerous variations of BASIC from Altair BASIC, MBASIC, GWBASIC, PDS BASIC, and of course the most well known of…
GWBASIC was bundled (free) with MS-DOS before QBASIC was made available (DOS 5, if I remember right).
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#65One niggle... Basic wasn't really free either. At least not QB45, etc. It's wasn't super expensive, but it wasn't free... Also worth a mention is computers themselves back in the 80's and early 90's costs as much or more than the cars a lot of people were driving at the time. I remember seeing a used XT in 1993 for around $200 or so, which was cheap enough, but state of the art was an 80486 DX2 66... Today, you can g…
BASIC was included with every 80s micro, and using QBASIC on an XT wouldn't be that different than on a 486. 286s and 386s were in widespread use in offices well into the 90s.
$20/mo for 5 years is over $1000, and you still need hardware on top of that. Vs buying a secondhand computer and using books from the library, it's not cheap.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#66An 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 approxim…
> An 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. This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes…
Gemini has been teaching me embedded Linux, and last year ChatGPT taught me C#. All on the free tiers mind you. But I'm doing the work, it's just faster to ask questions than to dig through mailing lists and source code.
At work though, the pressure to move fast is too high, so I'm letting Claude Code so more work these days (nowhere near the majority, but I've found things i can trust it with).
I don't think i could deal with a paid plan myself given how unpredictable the models are and opaque the pricing is.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#67I’m reasonably convinced this is the best argument against LLMs. It’s the same reason Open is in OpenAI’s name. The understanding that centralizing the ownership of these tools is going to transform the world is widespread. That’s why the investment is so high. If power and wealth isn’t concentrated into these AI labs the investment isn’t worth it. Which means we have to ask ourselves if we want that. There’s plenty…
> There's plenty of futures which include LLMs and don’t include the centralization but they require a departure from our current trajectory.
I don't think that's true at all. It's pretty clear that local models are the future of agentic coding, and everyone's been moving towards that goal.
It's also becoming clear that current models are much bigger than they really need to be. New research indicates that most transformer models can be shrunk significantly and still perform the same.
We definitely aren't there yet, but models that run on a single consumer GPU are getting better at a pretty fast pace. Model size keeps going down, efficiency keeps going up, and compute keeps getting faster and cheaper.
I really don't see a future where enormous datacenters are the only way to run a coding agent. Huge models might continue to be more performant, but the gap between that and a local model is closing quick.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#68I’m reasonably convinced this is the best argument against LLMs. It’s the same reason Open is in OpenAI’s name. The understanding that centralizing the ownership of these tools is going to transform the world is widespread. That’s why the investment is so high. If power and wealth isn’t concentrated into these AI labs the investment isn’t worth it. Which means we have to ask ourselves if we want that. There’s plenty…
The best argument against is they're just another scheme to prop up data center companies.
Use an LLM with the equivalent knowledge of Linux kernel and tect editor? Or git clone them.
It's another state management scheme being sold to politicians and elder investors who don't know any better. Big tech 100% relies on elder abuse.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#69An 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 approxim…
> An 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.
While thinking about/working with LLMs, I've been reminded more than once of Asimov's short story Profession (http://employees.oneonta.edu/blechmjb/JBpages/m360/Professio...). In it, no one goes to school: information is just dumped into your brain. You get an initial dump of the basics when you're a kid, and then later all the specialty information for your career (which is chosen for you, based on what your brain layout is most suited to).
The protagonist is one of a number of people who can't get the second dump; his brain just isn't wired right, so he's sent to a Home for the Feeble Minded to be with other people who have to learn the old-fashioned way.
Through various adventures he eventually realizes that everyone who was "taped" is incapable of learning new material at all. His Home for the Feeble Minded is in fact an Institute of Higher Studies, one of only a handful, which are responsible for all the invention and creation that sustains human progress.
Re: Programming Used to Be Free
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An 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. This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes…
Gemini has been teaching me embedded Linux, and last year ChatGPT taught me C#. All on the free tiers mind you. But I'm doing the work, it's just faster to ask questions than to dig through mailing lists and source code. At work though, the pressure to move fast is too high, so I'm letting Claude Code so more work these days (nowhere near the majority, but I've found things i can trust it with). I don't think i could…
I'm starting to do this at home, but the instinct to just do a web search is still there. I'm only using Claude Code at work because they are paying for it, so why not use it. I think I've used maybe 5% of my tokens for any given day so far. I need to pick a free AI and make it my goto AI mentor for what I want to learn.
Once I build a few things at work I'll probably be asking Claude Code to look for problems with what I've written, but we're not being pushed too hard to get into AI coding yet, though the writing is on the wall. I'm mostly looking for ways to expand what I can do within our current constraints, and keep my sanity.