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by deadbabe 15 days ago
I'm curious, LLMs have been around for a while now...

How many of you would say you need LLMs now for work? Not that you want it because it's nice to have, but rather you would literally not be able to do your job at all because you don't have an LLM to use?

If your company said "We're not paying for LLMs anymore.", would you begrudgingly pay for or host your own LLM that complies with company policies, or just go back to writing everything by hand?

I feel like companies could definitely just push the cost of LLMs back onto the engineers themselves (much like how people have to pay for their own gas to go to work), and engineers would have no choice but to either buy their own subscriptions or be very good at writing code by hand just to stay competitive.

This kind of shift is coming, partly because costs of LLMs are to unsustainable for companies, but also because it sounds like the kind of diabolical idea some upper management thinks they can get away with, as peer pressure will naturally do its thing. Paying for your own token usage is a small price to pay for job security isn't it?

2 comments

> If your company said "We're not paying for LLMs anymore.", would you begrudgingly pay for or host your own LLM that complies with company policies, or just go back to writing everything by hand?

I already write code myself, so perhaps I'm not your target audience. But I strongly believe that anyone who pays for his own LLM is being a fool. You should never pay for tools for work. If you do so, you're letting them take advantage of you rather than paying the needs of their own business. It's a bad deal, don't go down that road.

But you don’t need an LLM.
I'm an embedded systems developer. I have almost fully "outsourced" the Python code for frontend pc software that interacts with my firmware.

I deliberately continue to write all my firmware by hand, and will occasionally consult AI for review. I never use AI to write prose for me.

Python is better represented in training data, writing bench software was a bit boring, I get to spend more time where I have (and continue to build) domain knowledge.

Agentic Opus is a nice to have and I get to explore the frontier tech, but if (or when) it's taken away, a self hosted coding model would be fine - I'd just have to dust off my Python skills and it would take longer.