I'm not sure if it's just me getting older or what, but something strikes me as odd about the future of programming and software engineering: LLMs are impressive, but you have to pay to use them. I can't recall another core tool or technology in the software industry—something central not just to the field, but to the world—that isn't free or open source. Think TCP/IP, the Linux kernel, Postgres, Git, ffmpeg, qemu, Latex, Kubernetes, and so on. Sure, there's plenty of proprietary software out there, but it's not the backbone of the internet or the computing industry.
Now, LLMs have the potential to become part of that backbone, yet nobody seems particularly concerned that they’re not open source (I'm talking about GPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini). I know there are open source alternatives, but they’re not nearly as capable—and it seems most people here are perfectly fine using and paying for the proprietary ones.
I don’t like a future where I have to pay for every token just to write a program. And don’t tell me, "Well, just don’t use LLMs"; they’re going to become what Linux is today: ubiquitous.