Discussion

purplesyringa

satvikpendem: It still is free. No one is forcing anyone to use LLMs to learn to code.

compass_copium: No one is "forcing" you to drive a car to get to work, either. You could walk 20 miles if you live somewhere without decent public transit.My view is that the author is talking about having a knowledge of career-relevant skills, developed for free.If you can't develop the skills to be competitive in an interview without using LLMs, then you are forced by societal factors to use the LLMs.

neko_ranger: In fact when in "learning" mode you probably shouldn't use an LLM. Same reason why you don't immediately jump to a calculator when learning multiplication. Yes LLMs are more powerful than a calc, but at least you could have arrived at the same/similar result manually if you wanted to spend the time

zajio1am: 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.

dakiol: I struggle to understand the "hackers" in HN vouching for proprietary LLMs. Like we have so much so good open source software that is top notch like linux, git, postgres, http, tcp/ip, and a long etc., and now we have these billionaires trying to make us use LLMs for coding at a hefty price.I understand it from people like PG and the like, but real hackers? C'mon people

repelsteeltje: We 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.

alnwlsn: I also learned programming on QBASIC around the same time frame, but in my case it was mostly because all the old 90's computers were getting thrown away at that time, so there were plenty of parts around for a kid to learn about computers without breaking anything expensive.It was pretty easy back then to find software that would work on those machines on the internet, too. I'm not so sure it would be as easy for young people to learn using yesterday's computers today.

gbacon: Sitting down for the first time to QBASIC after years of Apple ][ BASIC, my first thought was a gleeful ‘No line numbers!’

z500: If I remember correctly, it even came with a utility to remove line numbers for you

tnelsond4: 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.

jimbokun: I'm not sure how true that is. There was copious free information on the internet to learn about coding.

Aurornis: I was fortunate to grow up when the internet was full of free learning resources, but there was a time just before that when you really did need physical books to get beyond the basics.I remember talking to people a couple decades older than me and being confused when they talked about having to buy compilers, too.

phendrenad2: [delayed]

DeathArrow: Nothing in life is free.

boomlinde: 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 like a good option to you at all.Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?

purplesyringa: > Very tangential, but I could swear QBasic included an on-disk documentation system accessible from the editor. Maybe only later versions?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.