| The more things change, the more they stay the same. Predicting the future, I can tell you with certainty that This Too Shall Pass. Just don't ask me what 'This' is: A fad, or a sea-change? My main Luddite objection to the current passion for LLM coding assistance is the new dependencies created/fostered within the software engineering diaspora. Not only are we dependent now on cloud access for so much of our SE now, but we'll also depend on the ongoing build-out, as LLM infrastructure bulldozes our real-world landscape, and we experience change from DRAM shortages to unwanted (NIMBY) construction of data centers. All based on the idea (yet again) that this is it. The question becomes, is it (or will it be) worth it? My personal prism of past experience does not lend itself to an easy answer. The move from assembly language to C was a no-brainer, but I remember resisting a transition from C to C++ ("I can do that in C with structs and function pointers") and the surge in OOP and COM and... the list goes on. I remember objecting to Rational Rose and UML because I just didn't trust code generated algorithmically. Boilerplate with artifacts. I don't think I was wrong to hesitate there. But I might be wrong now, to let others push the leading bleeding edge. Maybe it's time to get into it. Can I just download a trained LLM and host it myself, without a dependency on internet/cloud corporate/overlord/rented-infrastructure? I am willing to try, but I must declare that-- where I am, the Personal Computing revolution is not over. We still haven't won. And the rebellion: against auto-updates, telemetry, subscription models, any usage or dependency of/on your internet against your will. The fight for freedom goes on. Can I get a Claude Code to live in my home with me, air-gapped and all mine? Will I spend all my time spanking the agent? |