alt Hacker NewsAs much as people on Hacker News complain about subscription models for productivity and creativity suites, the open arms embrace of subscription development tools (services, really) which seek to offload the very act itself makes me wonder how and why so many people are eager to dive right in. I get it. LLMs are cool technology.
Is this a symptom of the same phenomenon behind the deluge of disposable JavaScript frameworks of just ten years ago? Is it peer pressure, fear of missing out? At its root, I suspect so; of course I would imagine it's rare for the C-suite to have ever mandated the usage of a specific language or framework, and LLMs represent an unprecedented lever of power to have an even bigger shot at first mover's advantage, from a business perspective. (Yes, I am aware of how "good enough" local models have become for many.)
I don't really have anything useful nor actionable to say here regarding this dialling back of capability to deal with capacity issues. Are there any indications of shops or individual contributors with contingency plans on the table for dialling back LLM usage in kind to mitigate these unknowns? I know the calculus is such that potential (and frequently realised) gains heavily outweigh the risks of going all in, but, in the grander scheme of time and circumstance, long term commitments are starting to be more apparently risky. I am purposefully trying to avoid "begging the question" here; if instead of LLMs, this were some other tool or service, reactions to these events would have been far more pragmatic, with less of a reticence to invest time on in-house solutions when dealing with flaky vendors.
Replies
> the open arms embrace of subscription development tools (services, really) which seek to offload the very act itself makes me wonder how and why so many people are eager to dive right in
Here's a reason not in your list.
Short version: A kind of peer pressure, but from above. In some circles I'm told a developer must have AI skills on their resume now, and those probably need to be with well known subscription services, or they substantially reduce their employment prospects.
Multiple people I know who are employers have recently, without prompting, told me they no longer hire developers who don't use AI in their workflow.
One of them told me all the employers they know think "seniors" fall into two camps, those who are embracing AI and therefore nimble and adaptive, and those who are avoiding it and therefore too backward-looking, stuck-in-their-ways to be a good hire for the future. So if they don't see signs of AI usage on a senior dev's resume now, that's an automatic discard. For devs I know laid off from an R&D company where AI was not permitted for development (for IP/confidentiality reasons), that's unfair as they were certainly not backward-looking people, but the market is not fair.
Another "business leader" employer I met recently told me his devs are divided into those who are embracing AI and those who aren't, said he finds software feature development "so slow!", and said if it wasn't for employment law he'd fire all his devs who aren't choosing to use AI. I assume he was joking, but it was interesting to hear it said out loud without prompting.
I've been to several business leadership type meetups in recent months, and it seems to be simply assumed that everyone is using AI for almost everything worth talking about. I don't think they really are, so it's interesting to watch that narrative playing out.
I really enjoy coding. I've build a number of projects, personal and professional, with Python, Rust, Java and even some Scala in the mix. However, I've been addicted to Claude Code recently, especially with the superpowers skill. It feels like I can manifest code with my mind. When developing with Claude, I am presented with design dilemmas, architectural alternatives, clarification questions, things that really make me think about the problem. I then choose a solution, propose alternatives, discuss, and the code manifests. I came to realize that I enjoy the problem solving, not the actual act of writing the code. Like I have almost cloned my self, and my clones are working on the projects and coming back to me for instructions. It feels amazing
Apart from local AI, a serious choice is aggregated API such as new-api [0]. An API provider aggregated thousands of accounts has much better stability than a single account. It's also cheaper than the official API because of how the subscription model works, see e.g. the analysis [1].
Well, I wanted to understand what is this cool new tech everybody is talking about so I bought a Max plan, experimented with various setups recommended by various experts, vibe-coded a few apps and then threw it all away.
I still use more traditional approach for finding bugs and other issues in my code, but the agentic workflow doesn't give me any net value.
> if instead of LLMs, this were some other tool or service, reactions to these events would have been far more pragmatic, with less of a reticence to invest time on in-house solutions when dealing with flaky vendors
As an example, a long term goal at the employer I work for is exactly this: run LLMs locally. There's a big infrastructure backlog through, so it's waiting on those things, and hopefully we'll see good local models by then that can do what Claude Sonnet or GPT-5.3-Codex can do today.
People will always go along with a removal of friction even against their benefit. It's natural bias, we have a preference for not spending energy.
It's why we pay stupid amounts for takeout when it's a button away, it's why we accept the issues that come with online dating rather than breaking the ice outside, it's why there's been decades scams that claim to get you abs without effort...
LLMs are the ultimate friction removal. They can remove gaps or mechanical work that regular programming can, but more importantly they can think for you.
I'm convinced this human pattern is as dangerous as addiction. But it's so much harder to fight against, because who's going to be in favor of doing things with more effort rather than less? The whole point of capitalism is supposed to be that it rewards efficiency.
Contingency plan? Just code without it like before. AI could disappear today and I would be very disappointed but it's not like I forgot how to code without it. If anything, I think it's made me a better programmer by taking friction away from the execution phase and giving me more mental space to think in the abstract at times, and that benefit has certainly carried over to my work where we still don't have copilot approved yet.
I would love nothing more than ditching Claude for a local solution tomorrow. But it doesn't exist today, so it is what it is - you gotta keep up with the joneses.
Maybe in 5 years we'll have an open weights model that is in the "good enough" category that I can run on a RTX 9000 for 15k dollars or whatever.
>I get it. LLMs are cool technology.
It would be cool to run SOTA models on my own hardware but I can't. Hence, the subscription.
I think most people understand the need for subscriptions here. It is an ongoing massive compute cost, and that’s what you’re paying for. Your local system is not capable of running the massive amount of compute required for this. If it were then we would see more people up in arms about it.
The great part is that you can always build your own selfhosted tools. There is nothing that can't be done at home, it's just a calculation of how much you're willing to spend.
Lately though the RAM crisis is continuing and making things like this more unfeasible. But you can still use a lot of smaller models for coding and testing tasks.
Planning tasks I'd use a cloud hosted one, for now, because gemma4 isn't there yet and because the GPU prices are still quite insane.
The cool and fun part is that with ollama and vllm you can just build your own agentic environment IDE, give it the tools you like, and make the workflow however you like. And it isn't even that hard to do, it just needs a lot of tweaking and prompt fiddling.
And on top of that: Use kiwix to selfhost Wikipedia, stackoverflow and devdocs. Give the LLM a tool to use the search and read the pages, and your productivity is skyrocketing pretty quickly. No need anymore to have internet, and a cheap Intel NUC is good enough for self-hosting a lot of containers already.
Source: I am building my own offline agentic environment for Golang [1] which is pretty experimental but sometimes it's also working.
[dead]
[dead]
HN is a big community that has always had a mix of people who value newness as a feature vs those who prioritize simplicity and reliability. Unless you're recognizing the exact same names taking these contradictory opinions it's probably different groups of people for the most part.
It seems like every LLM thread for the past couple years is full of posts saying that the latest hot AI tool/approach has made them unbelievably more productive, followed by others saying they found that same thing underwhelming.