The idea is you're basically expected to be a manager so the LLM is now your junior engineer except you don't get the joy of building someone up and watching them grow you get an expensive robot that never learns and can't remember what you said yesterday.

It's pretty funny watching software go from arguing about functional programming, total test coverage, side effect free code, and mathematical proofs of correctness to "eh just sorta run your eyes over code you didn't write and hope that 6 hours into your shift you're not letting anything critical by"

Erlang, Haskell, my beloved. I will still love you while the others are lost to a storm of madness.

The reason I disagree with this analogy is that the new tooling is fundamentally incompatible with software freedom that cannot be solved with gcc et al. I can't afford a $10k computer to run local models.

That's actually a good point but if we consider history the barrier to entry to software engineering was huge 40-50 years ago, not many people could afford to do it locally. Then again it's different because software as a whole wasn't really that important 50 years ago.

Then again "software freedom" as we know it may just as well be a coincidental transient phenomenon because capitalist markets arranged themselves in such a way to make the hardware and software required to build and maintain software accessible enough to the general public, that "right" can conceivably be taken away by the same system again, there is no reason to assume it's here to stay.

Honestly I'm just rambling at this point I have no idea where any of this leads I'm pretty much hoping the whole thing is gonna be a dud and we'll return to the same old way of doing things, capitalism is a fuck, death to america.

I can't afford a $10k computer to run local models.

Tbh you don't really need to either. With models like Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (which is quite close to the performance of frontier models from a year ago) enough of it fits onto a 8GB GPU - with the rest sitting in RAM or swapped out - to have it running at a speed that is very workable with. On my work laptop with a 4060 equivalent and llama.cpp + CUDA I get around 15-20 t/s for coding tasks. The equivalent Qwen 3.8 variant should be even better once that releases. I strongly believe small models like these running locally is going to be the way to go once the bubble bursts.

I can't afford a $10k computer to run local models.

Hopefully that is only temporary.

I imagine few people could afford a Unix system in 1987 when Stallman first wrote GCC.