But the price we're paying (and I don't mean money) is very high, imho. We all talk about how good engineers write code that depends on high-level abstractions instead of low-level details, allowing us to replace third party dependencies easily and test our apps more effectively, keeping the core of our domain "pure". Well, isn't it time we started doing the same with LLMs? I'm not talking about MCP, but rather an open source tool that can plug into either free and open source LLMs or private ones. That would at least allow us to switch to a free and opensource version if the companies behind the private LLMs go rogue. I'm afraid tho that wouldn't be enough, but it's a starting point.
To put an example: what would you think if you need to pay for every single Linux process in your machine? Or for every Git commit you make? Or for every debugging session you perform?
I have been building that for a couple of years now: https://llm.datasette.io
There are open source tools that do exactly that already.
But every single post I read don't mention them?
Does every single post about a Jetbrains feature mention that you can easily switch from Jetbrains to an open source editor like VS Code or vim?
Because the models are so much worse that people aren't using them.
Philosophical battles don't pay the bills and for most of us they aren't fun.
There have been periods of my life where I stubbornly persisted using something inferior for various reasons - maybe I was passionate about it, maybe I wanted it to exist and was willing to spend my time debugging and offer feedback - but there a finite number of hours in my life and often I'd much rather pay for something that works well than throw my heart, soul, time, and blood pressure at something that will only give me pain.
Has someone computed/estimated what is at cost $$$ value of utilizing these models at full tilt: several messages per minute and at least 500,000 token context windows? What we need is a wikipedia like effort to support something truly open and continually improving in its quality.
It just so happens that closed models are better today.
Fortunately there are many of these that can integrate with offline LLMs through systems like LiteLLM/Ollama/etc. Off the top of my head, I'd look into Continue, Cline and Aider.
https://github.com/continuedev/continue
Almost all providers and models can be used with the OpenAI api and swapping between them is trivial.