News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update) by fragmede on Sunday July 20, 2025 @01:15PM (#44627197)
> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools.

Not without a lot of hard thankless work by people like RMS to write said tools. Programming for a long while was the purview of Microsoft Visual Studio family, which cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. There existed other options, some of which was free, but, as is the case today with LLMs you can run at home, they were often worse.

This is why making software developer tools is such a tough market and why debugging remains basically in the dark ages (though there are the occasional bright lights like rr). Good quality tools are expensive, for doctors and mechanics, why do we as software developers expect ours to be free, libre and gratis?

Re:Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update) by bizzletk on Sunday July 20, 2025 @10:23PM (#44631234)
Programmers have the ability to write tools that make their jobs/lives easier. This is the perfect alignment of incentives where the person who benefits from the production of a high-quality tool has the ability to deliver one into their hands.

And once the tool has been made, many people just give it away for others to benefit from too.