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by SoftTalker 383 days ago
They might still. Why not?

Illustrates a risk of building a product with these AI coding tools. If your developers don't know how to build applications without using AI, then you're at the mercy of the AI companies. You might come to work one day and find that accidentally or deliberately or as the result of a merger or acquisition that the tools you use are suddenly gone.
2 comments
selcuka 383 days ago
> If your developers don't know how to build applications without using AI, then you're at the mercy of the AI companies.

The same can be said if your developers don't know how to build applications:

- without using syntax highlighting ...

- without using autocomplete ...

- without using refactoring tools ...

- without using a debugger ...

Why do we not care about those? Because these are commodity features. LLMs are also a commodity now. Any company with a few GPUs and bandwidth can deploy the free DeepSeek or QwQ models and start competing with Anthropic/OpenAI. It may or may not be as good as Claude 4, but it won't be a catastrophe either.

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yusefnapora 381 days ago
Those examples are all either zero cost or "buy once, use forever." How is that an argument against outsourcing your core competency to third party in perpetuity?
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selcuka 381 days ago
It's an argument against the original argument:

> you're at the mercy of the AI companies

You are not at the mercy of anyone. There are capable, open models that are self-hostable. For example, JetBrains IDEs come with a free local model [1] that runs on your CPU, which is exactly "buy once, use forever". If you want a bit more oomph a consumer level Nvidia GPU or Apple Silicon is sufficient.

> outsourcing your core competency to third party

I don't think my core competency is remembering obscure syntax, or being able to perform repetitive tasks. But if that's true, then I'm screwed anyway. My employer can simply pay an AI company 100 bucks a month and fire me. My own resistance against using LLMs won't change anything. The only logical thing to do would be to accept that my core competency is no longer valuable, and find another core competency.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/

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pbh101 383 days ago
This is true of any SaaS vendor
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