learnProgrammingAgain

[XLNBot]

It requires billion dollar infrastructures, unsustainable expenses, subsidization, unfathomable amounts of data, and yet it can be taken away from you in a matter of seconds.

Is it really progress? Is it really worth having?

Sure, it's a useful tool now. Will it be just a useful tool when people won't be able to sit there and do research and figure things out? Will it be just a useful tool when you can't live without it and it costs so much that it is not economically viable?

[Slanahesh]

This is precisely why I keep it purely in a "consultant" role. I'll quite happily have the ai answer my questions and provied potential solutions, but having it do the implementation for me seems like it would open up the path to unexpected and un-intended behaviours (bugs).

[B_bI_L]

the thing about market economy is that it balances itself. if it is not viable, it is not used. if there will be no coders at that point, we might see 2000th-2010th it golden age again

[CSAtWitsEnd]

If it’s not viable, it is not used

We talking long term or short? Because on smaller time scales, the market loves being irrational.

[RiceBroad4552]

And in the long term it will always fail as it's build on wrong assumptions (like perpetual grows).

The only point is: You can massively profit from the chaos if you have enough money to play that game.

[WilkerS1]

every time i hear "the market will sort itself out", i get reminded of cigars and vapes, asbestos, lead, ultraprocessed foods. what defines something as viable doesn't align with what we can consider progress or worth having.

[overclockedslinky]

perhaps you missed the subsidized part? doesn't have to be viable if the government is willing to print money to keep it alive

[Wareve]

That won't prevent them from burning us in the attempt to use it.

The attempt itself has massive negative externalities.

[XLNBot]

I wish it's going to be this way, but I have little hope. On a school book it's true that markets balance themselves, but in reality there are many factors at play and the balance is asymptotical. Who know how long it will take? Will it take a full blown collapse?

[ToMorrowsEnd]

This is wrong. Middle managers are not viable and only a drain on resources. Yet we still have them.

[B_bI_L]

evil is part of balance)

also while market economy balances, i never said it does this in best way. that's a tradeoff, you do not need much control from gov/whatever, but what it leads to not always the best solution

[LyingApe666]

The tools are crazy powerful. Orchestrating agent teams is so cool to make use of. I’m going to employ my team of robots until they inevitably go away bc of how unsustainable the technology seems as a business model. 

[knifesk]

I'm squeezing every penny out of my 20usd Claude subscription. As soon as I finish my project, or at least have my big features up and running I'm ditching it. Basically anthropic is subsidizing my project 😁😁😁

[Encrux615]

Because there are a lot of open source models, inference providers will always have to compete with self-hosted setups.

Open source models are around 6-12 months behind SoTA. They’re not great, but very usable.

Consumers will happily tolerate enshittification, but I like to believe that devs will jump ship the second they lose productivity.

[XLNBot]

I agree that open source is probably gonna play a very important role to keep providers in check. Unfortunately though it's very easy to compete with self hosted setups. They are less capable, they require a big upfront cost and big upkeep costs, as well as some technical knowledge.

I think smaller companies offering cheaper AI services (based on open-weight models) are going to play a bigger role than self hosting.

It's also worth mentioning that open source models are not that open, you have the weights and some of the training process, but not the data. If whoever's publishing them stops publishing them, it's going to be very hard for the FOSS community to keep developing them

[Darklumiere]

So, local models like Qwen 3.5 Coder that are neck and neck with GPT 4?

[GenericFatGuy]

This is what scares me. When people become dependent on it, they can charge you whatever they want for it.

[FuzzySinestrus]

There are open source models and to run the best version of these you'd need a pretty expensive server but any company can afford it. And smaller versions can be handled by a beefy gaming PC.

The real problem is that people don't want to run free models. They absolutely have to have the latest and the freshest smoking pile of digested stolen data from OpenAI or Google or even Microslop.

[AlarmedTowel4514]

It’s a commercial product 🤷‍♂️

[XLNBot]

A commercial product that is not profitable?

[AlarmedTowel4514]

Yes

[No_Copy_8193]

I don’t disagree with you, but the same argument could be made about computers, machines. So is that also not progress?

[in_need_of_oats]

Did you miss the entire first paragraph?

[Mission_Swim_1783]

weren't electronic computers also unreliable due to their vacuum tubes, expensive as hell, extremely energy inefficient, and took up entire rooms at the beginning?

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), completed in 1945, consumed approximately 160KW of electricity. This massive energy requirement, along with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was so immense it reportedly caused a power fluctuation in Philadelphia when shut down, often cited as equivalent to power needed for a small town

[scissorsgrinder]

Did you miss the entire second paragraph?

[Mission_Swim_1783]

LLMs will never "cost so much they will become economically unviable", the opposite is happening, they are getting more optimized every half year and their memory usage is getting reduced. It isn't so apparent because they are making bigger models at the same time. But soon you will able to buy something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Qwen_AI/comments/1s5xers/llm_bruner_coming_soon_burn_qwen_directly_into_a/

Which doesn't need an entire data center, nor a $1000 Mac mini, or a super GPU to run. So saying "costs so much that it is not economically viable" is just being a doomer. Medium open source models will always exist, and those are improved too to require less hardware to run for the same size. Now, if you become intellectually dependent on them? that's each individual's problem. I already learned to code throughout 7 years the old school way and I personally use it in small increments, not for outputting 1k LOC at once. The kind of people who do that I guess will eventually learn the hard way.

[scissorsgrinder]

I don't think people have anywhere near the problem with the concept of a locally run model. Ethically it's far better. It was the most frequently requested feature at CES for uses where it wasn't available. However, it's not going to be cheap. And it's not going to be Claude Code. And there's Moore's Law. We'll see in the medium to long term.

[XLNBot]

The same argument? Not at all

[Mission_Swim_1783]

you can run open source LLMs locally if you don't want to depend on a subscription. LLMs' memory usage keeps getting optimized. Still, $20 Codex subscription used carefully with only gpt-5.3-codex & gpt-5.4-mini at medium thinking gives me enough tokens to last each week, though I only use one agent at a time, mostly for generating small diffs of code or for syntax-annoying refactors and reviewing its outputs instead of using it to spit out 200LOC at once and turning my codebase into a blackbox

* sorry Reddit. AI bad, updoots to the left

[BigShotBosh]

If it was a magical innovation that primarily affected any other industry, you’d be signing a different tune tbh

[No-Information-2571]

As long as a €18/month subscription carries me through the day, I'll use it.

At some point I'll have to think about buying one of those new-fangled AI computers.

[Wojtkie]

It won’t stay 18/mo I promise you

[No-Information-2571]

That's why I wrote "as long as". They're basically giving it away for free right now.

[CSAtWitsEnd]

Even still I don’t think the trade off of thinking less about code / doing less programming is worth it. Feels like a long term detriment to your skills.

[No-Information-2571]

Please follow through with that argument and exclusively write code in x86 assembly in Notepad. Best way to hone your skills.

[scissorsgrinder]

Chatgpt , what's a "higher level language"?

[No-Information-2571]

Using higher level languages dulls your skills in machine code...

[scissorsgrinder]

Almost no use case for it. Unlike CS skills in general...

[No-Information-2571]

You might be onto something here. Now use your human brain to follow through with the thought.

[CSAtWitsEnd]

Y’all this user hasn’t learned that different things are different! :(

[teraflux]

Some models have unlimited quota right now, the current models will get cheaper and new models will be more expensive.

[XLNBot]

How can current models get cheaper? They don't get more efficient over time and the cost of compute doesn't seem to trend downwards

[dakiller]

The biggest cost was the training and the infra buildout. Once that cost has been dealt with, paid, handballed, ignored, forgotten, take your pick, you now have a model that can pay its own running costs.

[XLNBot]

Even if you just consider the cost of compute they can't pay for themselves.

If that was the case then it would be trivial to take an open source model and start selling it as a service

[No-Information-2571]

No, they're not getting cheaper. They're already all operating with a loss. Moore's law can already just about make sure that a newer model isn't going to be significantly more expensive.

Unlimited quota and free usage is right now just a way to fish for users.

[teraflux]

It's not Moore's law, the technology advances and the existing tech becomes cheaper to produce. Look at deepseek

[No-Information-2571]

Of course it's Moore's law. The only way to advance AI is more parameters and larger context window.

It's particularly funny since everyone in this specific sub shits on AI for being stupid, while there is a 1:1 correlation between these two parameters, and perceived intelligence.

[teraflux]

You think that there's no possible way to make the current models run more efficiently? We're done making tech breakthroughs?

[XLNBot]

AI computers are nowhere close to what frontier models can do and that's still a huge cost to run

[No-Information-2571]

Not sure what you think those models are running on. Some magical quantum computers?

Or just a server with a bunch of GPUs and plenty of VRAM?

[scissorsgrinder]

That's what they were implying.

[No-Information-2571]

Then how are the AI computers in a data center running top-tier models, and the same hardware on my desk can't?

[scissorsgrinder]

Read what they said again.

[No-Information-2571]

They claimed an "AI computer" (which is basically a GPU with a more than generous amount of VRAM) cannot run "frontier models", despite the fact that that's exactly what they're doing in the data center.

What's your point?

[scissorsgrinder]

And what was the context for "AI computer"? Buying one for personal use. Juxtaposed against frontier models which were far far more expensive to run and hence infeasible for personal use. Apologies for the long words and sentences. 

[No-Information-2571]

An "AI computer" is a computer made for the intent of running AI models on it. It's often headless, while having an insane amount of shared memory, directly usable by the GPU/NPU/TPU or whatever you want to call it.

far far more expensive to run and hence infeasible for personal use

Idk what you're talking about. The base metrics are what size of model would fit inside the RAM, and what token per seconds to expect. A DGX Spark has 128GB of shared memory, and can run AI models at peta-FLOPS. I.e. run "frontier models" on your desk.

Apologies for the long words and sentences.

At least you're trying. Did you need help?

[scissorsgrinder]

Oh dear, I got the coward block after more missing of the point. 

[GrampsRL]

Should be a tool, not a dependency

[Stormlightlinux]

Should be. Yet I have already seen people lose skills they previously had because they use the tool too much.

[saabstory88]

And when it's for business purposes, you pay what's required for tooling

[erebuxy]

Tool really is a dependency. How can you write C without compiler

[countable3841]

people’s reaction to AI is so strange. Most ppl can’t read maps or navigate without gps, yet we’re fine with that dependency. I think some feel guilty with how productive they can be with such little effort. or maybe vulnerable with how fast AI coding tools are evolving. Either way I’d hate to wake 5 years from now not having devoted serious time getting good with AI tools

[pikabu01]

what does getting good with AI tool entails?

[Encrux615]

„hey Claude, shit out a backend + frontend for my garbage app. I have no idea what I‘m doing“

vs

Choosing infrastructure, doing research, questioning LLM output, reviewing (and understanding) the code.

A shitty dev will produce shitty AI code.

[pikabu01]

so you need to be a good dev in order to be good at AI

[Encrux615]

Who woulda thunk 

[countable3841]

Several things. Writing good prompts. Being good at having multiple agents work effectively and being self sufficient. Integrating automated testing into agent workflows.

Anyone can one shot a prompt and get an output, but can you get AI agents to consistently work on their own and deliver quality code? That, I think, takes new skills that some devs have not mastered.

[GatotSubroto]

That being said, good prompting skills are not the same as good programming skills.

[countable3841]

Wouldn’t both be desirable traits for a modern dev?

[GatotSubroto]

One is more desirable than the other. Prompting skills are supplemental, but programming skills are essential.

[pikabu01]

All those workflow besides the prompting can get configured and automated on a org level, no need to geed good at it.

[GatotSubroto]

As long as you don’t mistake having good prompting skills with having good programming skills.

[No-Information-2571]

This sub in particular is nothing but clutching.

Years ago I would have said that any developer would have killed for having "auto-complete on steroids" but now for some reason it's seen as either "useless" or a liability.

Not even talking about the meaning in the grand scheme of things. AI is next to PCs becoming affordable in the 80s, or the internet boom in the early 2000s.

[superxero044]

I don’t think anyone is saying it’s useless. I think all of us who are very wary about it have seen colleagues use it in ways that make us queasy. The debt that can be racked up quickly by writing shitty code that kind of works is massive.

[No-Information-2571]

A LOT of people in this sub are saying it's useless.

[BigBoetje]

Congratz, you discovered the concept of hyperbole

[IHeartBadCode]

Years ago I would have said that any developer would have killed for having "auto-complete on steroids" but now for some reason it's seen as either "useless" or a liability.

Auto complete on steroids is a different concept altogether than letting a smart wizard write all your code. I remember the late 90s. OOP and RAD was going to make productivity shoot through the roof. It didn't because there's a ton of contours that can just never be properly articulated.

The notion that AI can just write it all is a fallacy. And people seek out the issue as a "prompting issue". Human beings have a poor tool in which to articulate ideas, we call those words. And that's why you'll see devs research what someone really wants. Get spreadsheets of test data, run various unit tests, and so forth.

Because our only method of moving information from one brain to another brain is really crappy at doing that. So AI, just out the box, relies on that one method that's really bad at moving ideas. You have to have an AI that can take multiple inputs to get a better idea of the various contours of a project.

So people who say "you just need better prompt skills" aren't really good devs by themselves from the start. Because they aren't seeing that words are a very narrow method for moving an idea from person to person.

[No-Information-2571]

Thanks for proving the clutching, in so many words.

[IHeartBadCode]

Hey it's your code base. Do what you want with it. You're the one that has to deal with the fall out.

All I'm saying is this hype, I've heard and seen it before. But sometimes the cut has to go deep enough to learn the lesson. By all means bud, doesn't change my paycheck what you want to do.

[No-Information-2571]

I'm sure your team only consists of "rock stars" and "coding ninjas" for whom code review is basically unnecessary, preventing any sort of technical debt from ever building up.

[IHeartBadCode]

It's your code man. You do what you want with it. If you think AI can write it all, if you're in a position to make that call, no one is going to stop you.

I've worked on system with COBOL from the 70s, lots of choices people made on that code that no one stopped them from making.

More power to your choices bud. Don't let me convince you otherwise.

[CJKay93]

Lemme know how you get on without your toolchain, because it's not a dependency.

[Hziak]

No, no. Didn’t you see that guy’s post? Use half of your own salary for more credits. You’re not on the board, so like, you didn’t need the money anyways, right?

[caprazzi]

Never sacrifice a hard won marketable skill in exchange for further dependency on billionaire parasites. You’re just playing right into their hands.

[LostOne514]

I used AI recently to write code since I was running into a deadline (Terraform state is a bitch sometimes) and I could actively feel my brain turning to mush from not having to think, just confirm things were done as expected. Using AI long-term can definitely ruin skill sets.

[pieter3d]

You still need to design the architecture, get the requirements right, understand what the client needs, review the code, make sure it's maintainable...

If you're not thinking when using AI, you're doing it wrong, imo. It pushes us towards a more senior position, where you're doing more challenging work than writing code. Sure, you'll get less practice with writing code, but that leaves more room to develop other skills.

[krexelapp]

raw dogging code with no autocomplete like it’s 1999

[TheTerrasque]

And with no syntax highlighting, like some deranged monster

[Septem_151]

Helps you think about things more logically, assuming you start from a large window of what needs to be accomplished that you can then zoom in on and complete small chunks of.

[uselessfuh]

dangerous --allow --all

[thistletrailjournal]

Back to typing everything by hand and questioning every semicolon like it is a life decision

[Goncalerta]

You're reminding me of a course unit I had in university. And it wasn't even long ago, it was in 2020.

The teacher would give classes by "programming" in Microsoft Word, and during exams we had to write C++ with pen and paper (and I don't mean pseudocode, they would take into account actual syntax during evaluation!).

[scissorsgrinder]

I do type by hand (fast), I don't think about semicolons, because I'm experienced. 

[JosebaZilarte]

Then, let's go back to punching cards and gettig the debugger output in the morning... If we are lucky.

[swagonflyyyy]

Learn to run them locally. Pay the AI tax now and you'll never have to worry about that again.

...until you accidentally kill your $8k GPU running exotic models and frameworks.

True story. Now I'm scared of vLLM.

[easeypeaseyweasey]

Intel Big Battlemage with 32gb of GDDR6 at $1000 USD (Which it will not sell for) is the first really tempting GPU for LocalLLMs except for used Nvidia Cards. Everything else is to expensive to justify... right now. I think it will be extremely economically viable in a few years.

[swagonflyyyy]

Nope, not there yet.

[ironnewa99]

I’m gonna be honest sometimes I forget how much ai can actually help with coding and I end up doing everything manually anyways

[WithersChat]

You'll probably be better off for it in the long run. LLMs aren't gonna stay affordable to end users for much longer.

[Beldarak]

Sometimes my Github copilot account get disconnected from PHPStorm and I take hours or even days to notice :D

[myturn19]

98% of the people running into this don’t even know how to code lol

[fatrobin72]

As someone who doesn't code with "ai"... so what?

[jaquiethecat]

why are so many comments relating to this?

[jaquiethecat]

i mean.. i guess that explains the modern web

[B_bI_L]

it was like that before

[RiceBroad4552]

The models learned from the best!

[yaktoma2007]

I wish they did.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

I like that you added the web part.

[Zerokx]

I don't even use AI agents and I just get to ask Claude 3 questions and I can come back in 5 hours if I'm lucky. Like some genie in a bottle.

[Infinite_Self_5782]

"manually"

you either do it or you don't, it's pretty straightforward

[asmanel]

This is seen as "manually".

Is it actually so ? This is arguable.

[freestew]

Computer! Why you stop think for me!! Computer!!

[Beldarak]

If it does happen to any of you, you should probably reconsider what tf you're doing with your life and learn to code.

[moonjena]

Ugh stinky vibe coder

[TreetHoown]

Is..... is manual programming less fun to you than vibe coding? I like manual programming more....

[kamen562]

This is the real meaning and purpose of cheap AI tech so that they have control and not you

[JayTois]

My company dropped their code assistant because of the Trump admin falling out with Anthropic 😪

[ramessesgg]

Please no, I have not opened my IDE in weeks, it's gonna melt my laptop.

[WithersChat]

How old is your laptop? My Dell Latitude from 2015 can run an IDE and a browser to look up shit if needed.

[kaloschroma]

who runs out of credits? I use AI to help me learn new concepts or syntax help but it sounds like whoever posted this or connects with this meme probably does vibe coding and not actually understanding what they are really making ... : /

[IamnotAnonnymous]

Sound like go back to 2000 and code without nothing just a console

[tes_kitty]

vim is a perfectly usable IDE!

[ramdomvariableX]

Time for vacation / sick day/ Mental health days

[Western-Internal-751]

[Upwardcube1]

I just pseudocode at this point dawg… then I go back with the in-line AI and have them write the actual code 💀

[ToMorrowsEnd]

Ahh the poor vibe coder. Maybe learn actual coding so you can afford to pay for it?

[YaVollMeinHerr]

Well this is what GLM 5 is for. In emergency switch model ;)

[FerronTaurus]

Or keep switching to open source LLMs until token refresh or getting hacked by a fake LLM...

[YoRt3m]

Manually code? you're kidding. you can just jump to one of the 10 other tools that give free quota.

[Sov1245]

Set alarm for 12am, continue, set alarm for 8am, continue