[zajio1am]

Programming is free if you do not consider price of your time. If you consider it, it is much higher than AI-associated costs. And even with AI-associated costs, it is still much cheaper than most other engineering professions, where physical realization is orders of magnitude more costly.

[jimbokun]

Well of course. The article is about the author's experience of being a young person with no money but plenty of time.

This is exactly the kind of person that could be excluded by a programming culture that requires extensive use of LLMs.

[discreteevent]

If you were a young person with plenty of time, the best way you could spend it would be learning to program without AI- whether you have money or not.

[tracker1]

LLMs aren't a requirement though.. and if you're learning, you're probably better off without the things. I was pretty down and out after the .com bubble burst and was staying in a house a friend was renovating without internet access for a while... I learned C# from a big fat book and the beta command line compiler... for years, I knew the language and tools better than my peers.

You can't get that level of depth with an LLM... because you generally won't be digging in... for that matter, if you're vibe coding, you're even further removed from the details of how things are being done for better or worse.

[kibwen]

LLM providers are interested in maximizing their profits, not minimizing your costs. The eventual goal of the providers, and the reason that they have trillion-dollar valuations, is because the objective is to capture the market and then increase the price to capture the value of any time you may be saving by using them. In other words, if your time savings amounts to $100 per hour by using LLMs, their goal is to eventually charge you $99.99 per hour for the privilege of using them.