There has generally always been some barrier. Computer access, internet access, books etc. If AI coding stays around, which looks like it will, it will just be the current generations barrier.

I don’t think it is sad at all. There are barriers to all aspects of life, life is not fair and at least in our lifetimes will never be. The best anyone can do is to help those around them and not get caught up the slog of the bad things happening in the world.

Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for

Very true. One of the greatest aspects of the field is how accessible it is, and that is certainly going to get worse with LLM usage.

I'd probably be toiling away in a less productive industry if I hadn't been able to easily download Python and start learning it for free.

They're not that expensive for anyone that has the tech skills to actually make good use out of them. I've been paying around with Claude Code, using API credits rather than the monthly fee. It costs about $5 per one-hour session. If you're going to be doing this professionally it's worth springing for the $100/month membership to avoid hitting credit limits, but if you just want to try it out, you can do so without breaking the bank.

A bigger question for me is "Does this actually increase my productivity?" The jury is still out on that - I've found that you really need to babysit the algorithm and apply your CS knowledge, and you also have to be very clear about what you're going to tell it later, don't let it make bad assumptions, and in many cases spell out the algorithm in detail. But it seems to be very good at looking up API details, writing the actual code, and debugging (if you guide it properly), all things that take a non-trivial amount of tedium in everyday programming.

yes indeed, who will pay? I run a lot through open models locally using LM Studio and Ollama, and it is nice to only be spending a tiny amount of extra money for electricity.

I am retired and not wanting to spend a ton of money getting locked long term into using an expensive tool like Claude Code is a real thing. It is also more fun to sample different services. Don’t laugh but I am paying Ollama $20/month just to run gpt-oss-120b very fast on their (probably leased) hardware with good web search tooling. Is it worth $20/month? Perhaps not but I enjoy it.

I also like cheap APIs: Gemini 2.5-flash, pro when needed, Kimi K2, open models on Groq, etc.

The AI, meaning LLM, infrastructure picture is very blurred because of so many companies running at a loss - which I think should be illegal because long term I think it is misleading consumers.

>the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.

Considering opportunity cost, a young person paying $20 or $100 per month to Claude API access is way cheaper than a young person spending a couple of years to learn to code, and some months coding something the AI can spit in 10 minutes.

AI coding will still create generations that even programming graduates know fuck all about how to code, and are also bad at reasoning about the AI produced code they depend on or thinking systematically (and that wont be getting any singularity to bail them out), but that's beside the point.

> This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary

Agreed. And on the one hand you have those who pay an AI to produce a lot of code, and on the other hand you have those who have to review that code. I already regularly review code that has "strange" issues, and when I say "why does it do this?" the answer is "the AI did it".

Of course, one can pay for the AI and then review and refactor the code to make it good, but my experience is that most don't.

I agree that access is a problem now, but I think it is one that hardware improvements will solve very quickly. We are a few generations of Strix Halo type hardware away from effortlessly running very good LLMs locally. (It's already possible, but the hardware is about $2000 and the LLMs you can run are good but not very good.) AFAIK AMD have not released the roadmap for Medusa Halo, but the rumours [1] are increased CPU and GPU performance, and increased bandwidth. Another iteration or two of this will make Strix Halo hardware more affordable, and the top-of-the-line models will be beasts for local LLMs.

[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Powerful-Zen-6-Medusa-Halo-iGP...

LLMs are quickly becoming cheaper. Soon they will be “cheap as free,” to quote Homestar Runner. Then programming will be solved, no need for meatbags. Enjoy the 2-5 years we have left in this profession.

One can create a free Google account and use Gemini for free.

Or think it this way: It's easy to get base level free LLM (Toyota) but one should not expect free top of the shelf (Porsche).

Does anyone have a good recommendation of a claude code like tool that uses locally hosted models?

Eh back in the day computers were expensive and not everyone could afford one (and I don't mean a library computer that you can work on, one you can code and hack on). The ubiquity of computing is not something that's been around forever.

There have always been costs and barriers for the cutting edge.

Maybe local models can address this, but for me the issue is that relying on LLMs for coding introduces gatekeepers.

> Uh oh. We're getting blocked again and I've heard Anthropic has a reputation for shutting down even paid accounts with very few or no warnings.

I'm in the slack community where the author shared their experiment with the autonomous startup and what stuck out to me is that they stopped the experiment out of fear of being suspended.

Something that is fun should not go hand-in-hand with fear of being cut off!

You made me realize exactly why I love skill-based video games, and shun the gacha games (especially those with PvP). You swiped to gain power over players who don't. Yay?

The knowledge check will also slowly transfer towards the borders of fast iteration and not necessarily knowledge depth. The end goal is to make a commodity out of the myth of the 10x dev, and take more leverage away from the devs.

This is a pro for a lot of the people whom AI people are targeting: idiots with money.

I strongly disagree agents are for extroverts.

I do agree it’s definetly a tool category with a unique set of features and am not surprised it’s offputting to some. But it’s appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert.

For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language.

I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort.

Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff!

It’s a great time to be a software engineer!

> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.

This sounds like a wild generalization.

I am in neither of those two groups, and I’ve been finding tools like Claude Code becoming increasingly more useful over time.

Made me much more optimistic about the direction of AI development in general too. Because with each iteration and new version it isn’t getting anywhere closer to replacing me or my colleagues, but it is becoming more and more useful and helpful to my workflow.

And I am not one of those people who are into “prompt engineering” or typing novels into the AI chatbox. My entire interaction is typically short 2-3 sentences “do this and that, make sure that XYZ is ABC”, attach the files that are relevant, let it do its thing, and then manual checks/adjustments. Saves me a boatload of work tbh, as I enjoy the debugging/fixing/“getting the nuanced details right” aspect of writing code (and am pretty decent at it, I think), but absolutely dread starting from a brand new empty file.

> I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control.

Try aider.chat (it's in the name), but specifically start with "ask" mode then dip a toe into "architect" mode, not "code" which is where Claude Code and the "vibe" nonsense is.

Let aider.chat use Opus 4.1 or GPT-5 for thinking, with no limit on reasoning tokens and --reasoning-effort high.

> agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.

On the contrary, I think the non-vibe tools are force multipliers for those with an ability to communicate so precisely they find “extraverts and neurotypical people” confounding when attempting to specify engineering work.

I'd put both aider.chat and Claude Code in the non-vibe class if you use them Socratically.

> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.

Please stop with this kind of thing. It isn't true, it doesn't make sense and it doesn't help anyone.

For me (an introvert), I have found great value in these tools. Normally, I kind of talk to myself about a problem / algorithm / code segment as I'm fleshing it out. I'm not telling myself complete sentences, but there's some sort of logical dialog I am having with myself.

So I just have to convert that conversation into an AI prompt, basically. It just kind of does the typing for the construct already in my head. The trick is to just get the words out of my head as prompt input.

That's honestly not much different than an author writing a book, for example. The story line is in their head, they just have to get it on paper. And that's really the tricky part of writing a novel as much as writing code.

I therefore don't believe this is an introvert/extrovert thing. There are plenty of book authors which are both. The tools available as AI code agents are really just an advanced form of dictation.

For what it’s worth I’m neurodivergent, introverted and have avoided management up to the staff+level. Claude Code is great I use it all day every day now.

I kind of think we will see some industry attrition as a result of LLM coding and agent usage, simply because the ~vIbEs~ I'm witnessing boil down to quite a lot of resistance (for multiple reasons: stubbornness, ethics, exhaustion from the hype cycle, sticking with what you know, etc)

The thing is, they're just tools. You can choose to learn them, or not. They aren't going to make or break your career. People will do fine with and without them.

I do think it's worth learning new tools though, even if you're just a casual observer / conscientious objector -- the world is changing fast, for better or worse, and you'll be better prepared to do anything with a wider breadth of tech skill and experience than with less. And I'm not just talking about writing software for a living, you could go full Uncle Ted and be a farmer or a carpenter or a barista in the middle of nowhere, and you're going to be way better equipped to deal with logistical issues that WILL arise from the very nature of the planet hurtling towards 100% computerization. Inventory management, crop planning, point of sale, marketing, monitoring sensors on your brewery vats, whatever.

Another thought I had was that introverts often blame their deficits in sales, marketing and customer service on their introversion, but what if you could deploy an agent to either guide, perform, or prompt (the human) with some of those activities? I'd argue that it would be worth the time to kick the tires and see what's possible there.

It feels like early times still with some of these pie in the sky ideas, but just because it's not turn-key YET doesn't mean it won't be in the near future. Just food for thought!

> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.

As an extrovert the chances I'll use an AI agent in the next year is zero. Not even a billion to one but a straight zero. I understand very well how AI works, and as such I have absolutely no trust in it for anything that isn't easy/simple/solved, which means I have virtually no use for generative AI. Search, reference, data transformation, sure. Coding? Not without verification or being able to understand the code.

I can't even trust Google Maps to give me a reliable route anymore, why would I actually believe some AI model can code? AI tools are helpers, not workers.

At one point in my life I liked crafting code. I took a break, came back, and I no longer liked it--my thoughts ranged further, and the fine-grained details of implementations were a nuisance rather than ~pleasurable to deal with.

Whatever you like is probably what you should be doing right now. Nothing wrong with that.

I think they're fantastic at generating the sort of thing I don't like writing out. For example, a dictionary mapping state names to their abbreviations, or extracting a data dictionary from a pdf so that I can include it with my documentation.

I bet your code sucks in quality and quantity compared to the senior+ engineer who uses the modern tools. My code certainly did even after 20 years of experience, much of that as senior/staff level at well paying companies.

It is effin nutzo that you would try to relate chatting with AI and agentic LLM codegen workflows to the intra/extra vert dichotomy or to neuro a/typicality - you so casually lean way into this absolute spectrum that I don’t even think associates the way you think it does, and it’s honestly kind of unsettling, like - what do you think you know about me, and about My People, that apparently I don’t know??

If it doesn’t work for you that’s fine, but turning it into some tribalised over-generalization is just… why, why would you do that, who is that kind of thing useful for??

You are leaving a lot of productivity on the table by not parallelizing agents for any of your work. Seemingly for psychological comfort quirks rather than earnestly seeking results.

Automation productivity doesn’t remove your own agency. It frees more time for you to apply your desire for control more discerningly.

>Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.

I completely disagree. Juggling several agents (and hopping from feature-to-feature) at once, is perfect for somebody with ADHD. Being an agent wrangler is great for introverts instead of having to talk to actual people.

I think you misunderstand what this does. It is not only a coding agent. It is an abstraction layer between you and the computer.

Pretty sure we can make LLM agents to transform declarative inputs to agentic action.

Agents are boon for introverts who fucking hate dealing with other people (read: me). I can iterate rapidly with another 'entity' in a technical fashion and not have to spend hours explaining in relatable language what to do next.

I feel as if you need to work with these things more, as you would prefer to work, and see just how good they are.

> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people

As a neurodivergent introvert, please don't speak for the rest of us.

This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.

I definitely understand the concern - I don't think I'd have hung out on HN for so long if LLM generated postings were common. I definitely recognize this is something you don't want to see happening at scale.

But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of course it will eventually want to post its work on HN.

It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes, he's learned something from me!"

(author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have seen it.

I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?

I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174 (posted 12 hours ago)

I mean I can spam HN right now with a script.

Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc.

Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been this way.

it's annoying but it'll be corrected by proper moderation on these forums

as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at work

The Internet is already 99% shit and always has been. This doesn't change anything.

There was a time when everyone hand-coded HTML. Then came Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage which promised a WYSIWYG experience. No one would ever need to "learn HTML and CSS" because the tool could write it for them. Those tools could crank out a website in minutes.

When those tools created some awful, complex and slow output, only the people who knew HTML could understand why it wasn't working and fix things.

Vibe coding is in a similar place. It demos really well. It can be powerful and allows for quick iteration on ideas. It works, most of the time. Vibe coding can produce some really terrible code that is not well architected and difficult to maintain. It can introduce basic logic errors that are not easily corrected through multiple prompts back to the system.

I don't know if they will ever be capable of creating production quality systems on par with what senior engineers produce or if they will only get incrementally better and remain best for prototypes and testing ideas.

It is addicting

> it’s just fun

For some definitions of fun… :)

Thanks for sharing this! I have been trying on and off to run RooCode on a VPS to use it on the go. I tried Code Server but it does not share "sessions". KASM seems interesting for this. Do share if you write a blog post on setting it up

I've been a full stack engineer for 10 years and I know SQL syntax but a few years ago I was asked at an interview "make a relation between users and posts" and I went "rails generate user" or something, and he's like, "not that," so I was like "OK I'll add it to a prisma file" and he's like "not that, write the SQL. I dunno what to do because this has never happened before."

Needless to say, I did not get the job, but several years later I still don't know how to answer his question.

I've worked with NOSQL (Mongo/Mongoose, Firebase) and I've worked with ORMs (Prisma, drizzle, Hasura), and I've been able to implement any feature asked of me, across several companies and projects. Maybe there's a subset of people who really do need to know this for some really low level stuff, but I feel like your average startup would not.

I think maybe it's similar to "can you reverse a linked list" question in that maybe you won't need the answer to that particular question on the job, but knowing the answer will help you solve adjacent problems. But even so, I don't think it's a good qualifier for good vs bad coders.

I'm nearly guilty of this. I've been in industry for a bit over 10 years and I can barely write SQL. That's despite writing a bunch of queries by hand in my undergrad databases course. I almost never deal with databases myself outside of some ad-hoc queries.

I started to notice this in a big way at my last job which I started in 2013. We were a rails shop and by about 2016 I was noticing most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL query.

I see this too, also for engineers that have only interacted with relational dbs via ORMs & query builders

That's so weird to me, SQL is the very first language they taught me in college 20 years ago, before even learning how to write a for loop in pseudo code. Nowadays it's still the language I use the most on a daily basis.

I don't deal with SQL and my knowledge of it is limited to what I learned in high school a long time ago, but… isn't SQL like super easy? What's so difficult about it that people don't know how to use it? To me git is harder and I use that tool daily.

You should at least know how to query your data warehouse environment to debug your services / find out if they're working!

I think ORM did a lot of that too

I dont think they teach SQL or relational algebra any more, or at least its easy to get an IT degree and avoid it altogether.

Terrifying.

Well said. Some of the best engineers I know looked up syntax whenever they needed it because there’s not much point in wrote learning everything. As long as they understand what they’re doing, that’s the main point.

I’m honestly so sick of interviews filled with gotcha questions that if you’d happened to study the right thing you could outperform a great experienced engineer who hadn’t brushed up on a couple of specific googlable things before the interview. It’s such a bad practice.

Maybe it’s time for you to update your perspective. You strike me as the old guy who curses all the young’ens who use the fancy electric power tools and never learn how to use a manual saw … and you don’t like it much.

I'd say "Learn the wrong things much faster". But I'd actually argue that learning isn't a fast process, it's rather a very slow journey, takes time and dedication to master deep knowledge. You won't learn anything that will stay with llms, if they got the output correct

I think the point is how can you squeeze anything out of the AI without knowing the stuff at a deep enough level?

> I'd rather hire someone [...] than someone who can do the work manually without assistance or fizz buzz on a whiteboard

and the reason for you to do that would be to punish the remaining bits of competence in the name of "the current thing"? What's your strategy?

For your examples, honestly yeah. A dev should familiar with the basic concepts of their language and tech stack. So yes, they should be able to understand a basic snippet of code without Google, an LSP, or even a computer. They should even be able to "write CTEs with a pencil and paper". I don't expect them to get the syntax perfect, but they should just know the basic tools and concepts enough to have something at least semantically correct. And they certainly should be able to understand the code produced by an AI tool for a take home toy project.

I say this as someone who would definitely be far less productive without Google, LSP, or Claude Code.

Used to write Perl scripts with pencil while waiting at the airport.

I actually have noticed it do this by itself a couple of times, it's where I got the idea to do the same

It works because they exported it. VAR=foo bar only sets it for the env passed to that exec or subshell, export VAR=foo && bar adds it to the current env then executes bar.

export VAR=foo && bar is dangerous because it stays set.

This might have been the case for fish shell; but not anymore, it works in current version. I myself have used the popular syntax without specifying `env` in my aliases.

"Here is how you build a self-replicating unknown-impact protein structure that will survive in the wild. If this bothers you, stop reading".

Other people's blasé risk profile -- or worse, willful denial of risk -- is indeed our problem. Why?

1. Externalities, including but not limited to: security breaches, service abuse, resource depletion, and (repeat after me -- even if you only think the probability is 0.01%, such things do happen) letting a rogue AI get out of the box. *

2. Social contagion. Even if one person did think about the risks and deem them acceptable, other people all too often will just blindly copy the bottom-line result. We are only slightly evolved apes after all.

Ultimately, this is about probabilities. How many people actually take the fifteen minutes to thoughtfully build an attack tree? Or even one minute to listen to that voice in their head that says "yeah, I probably should think about this weird feeling I have ... ... maybe my subconscious mind is trying to tell me something ... maybe there is indeed a rational basis for my discomfort ... maybe there is a reason why people are warning me about this."

Remember, this isn't only about "your freedom" or "your appetite for risk" or some principle of your political philosophy that says no one should tell you what to do. What you do can affect other people, so you need to own that. Even if you don't care what other people think, that won't stop a backlash.

* https://www.aisafetybook.com/textbook/rogue-ai

Why in the world would you advocate explicitly for letting it run on production servers, rather than teaching it how to test in a development or staging environment like you would with a junior engineer?

We allow juniors in risky areas because that’s how they will learn. Not the case for current AIs.

My workflow is somewhat similar to yours. I also much love --dangerously-skip-permissions, as root! I even like to do it from multiple Claude Code instances in parallel when I have parallel ideas that can be worked out.

Maybe my wrapper project is interesting for you? https://github.com/release-engineers/agent-sandbox It's to keep Claude Code containerized with a copy of the workspace and a firewall/proxy so it can only access certain sites. With my workflow I don't really risk much, and the "output" is a .patch file I can inspect before I git apply it.

How can an LLM determine a confidence score for its findings?

I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about but nobody is running Claude Code on our server fleet here.

and again we can tell based on how the x isn’t centered in the close button

What specifically are its modes of failure? I've never tried doing that, do very curious what the roadblocks are.

I've found it very useful to have items like requirements.md, plans.md, or todo.md, in my LLM focused projects. I'll use AI to help take the ideas I have at that stage and refine them into something more appropriate for ingestion into the next stage. So, when I want it to come up with the plans, it is going to base is mostly on requirements.md, and then I'll have it act on the plans step by step after that.

the thing is, it's not working as the default mode, which is not ideal imho

My experience has generally been positive, even as a small customer spending in the low thousands per month. I've definitely had help that wasn't particularly effective or adept. Lots of gradual escalations which are fairly time consuming. But they've certainly made sure I had assistance, and it was fairly prompt.