[easton]

> If you don't do that you'll run into the same problems as you would if you hire a contractor to build your codebase without understanding what they did for you.

I guess the difference is now that the contractor is cheap or free (because it’s a LLM), whereas in the old days you’d either hire a person to do the work and not understand or pick up a book and figure it out yourself (or go to school, or whatever). Figuring it out yourself was often cheaper and then you could understand.

(Not that humans can be replaced by LLM devs yet, or that LLM generated code is necessarily unreadable. It’s usually fine as you say.)

[sottol]

I have a feeling that if there was not a healthy amount of competition in the space, the prices would start to trend towards the cost of human work.

[antifa]

And the self-hosted options are better than nothing, I'm currently getting code autocompletions via Starcoder+TabbyML on an M1 MacBook pro.