The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code
(techtrenches.dev)
ProgrammingAuthor missed one aspect. Even if AI is one day reliable, it'll most likely be owned by a few companies. What if those companies decide to cut you off?
Open source models ? https://huggingface.co/ + https://lmstudio.ai/
The useful ones are still provided by big companies because the rest of us can't afford the hardware to train them.
AI won't be "democratized" anytime soon like the rest of the computer software world has.
For which you still need massive amounts of memory and compute to run reliably. That, and the fact that chatbots and agents nowadays rely on all sorts of proprietary customizations, outside of the realm of LLMs, to perform certain tasks.
The gap will take decades to close, if it ever does.
For which you still need massive amounts of memory and compute to run reliably
2026's average gaming PC is massive amounts of memory and compute apparently
The gap will take decades to close, if it ever does.
lol there are plenty of open source models in the top 100 with multiple SOTA models released in the last few months alone
There's also smaller LLM's being made like https://eurollm.io/ which excel in their own ways
This conversation reminds of me of the old Linux vs Windows conversations I had 20 years ago, linux will die, it's not as good as Windows, it will never catch up etc yet here I am still using Ubuntu happily :)
So how would I create such an "Open Source" model? They don't share the data used to create them do they? Let's not even get started on how much computing power I would need to train one of those things. These selfhosted models solve nothing except some data privacy issues. Sure you no longer send all your code to a shady AI company but you are still 100% dependent on them sharing their models.
Do you build your own Linux from scratch? If so why would you assume you can build an LLM from scratch?
So how would I create such an “Open Source” model? They don’t share the data used to create them do they?
No, and going by the OSI definition of "open source AI" they don't have to, acknowledging that the training material is often copyrighted and can't be shared.
It's a strange definition of "open source", one where you're not actually allowed to see the source.
Look at the state of software today. Every corporation and government are blindly sticking with Microsoft, Google or similar. Even though there are some ideas to move away and embrace OSS, I doubt it will happen with governments, even less with corps. I foresee something similar in future with AI.
Every corporation and government are blindly sticking with Microsoft
Are you sure?
France to remove Windows from government computers in sovereignty push
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260417-france-to-remove-windows-from-government-computers-in-sovereignty-push
https://tuta.com/blog/countries-ditching-microsoft-choosing-linux-digital-sovereignty
I doubt it will happen with governments
It does not take much for things to change, you might like this:
We've Hit A Wall With Transport. Here's Why | Black Swans 3 | If You're Listening
https://youtu.be/o1R6Aq19A6Y?t=1281
Sure but it’s mostly been that way for awhile. The players on the board shift, but it’s almost always Java, or Microsoft’s flavor of the decade or classic C or objective c or switch or whatever. Are you arguing that big tech will lock down their documentation on APIs and proprietary language behind their own AIs so that developers are focred to “vibe code” them through AI interaction only, and open source models will be unable to train on them?
It's really sad state programmers (especially juniors) are in right now, I guess it will get worse over time. I had a meeting with recruiters in my university, many of em just said to me send email and useless stuff that don't go anywhere but couple of em said they're don't even hire developers anymore and make AI do the entire job (I went on one of their websites and it didn't work :)). Also hackathons are really in bad state, most of em advertise ai and vibe coding, idk how anyone can learn from hackathons in this state they are in
In a few years, corpos will be desperate for programmers. Their codebases will be in shambles and the frontier models (that can barely make anything out of that mess) will not be so heavily subsidized anymore. (Or permanently offline.)
I think it will happen eventually but I doubt it will be in just a few years, hope to be proven wrong tho
Software engineering is comparable to architecture; if you give a rookie professional tooling, they can maybe build a safe shack or tree house. But you wouldn't want to visit a skyscraper they've built.
Except that architecture has safety codes written in blood. And AI is only good in building lots of walls.
I note that even job offers are written by AI. Every advertisement for, say, embedded developers, seems to use the same generic keywords and interfaces, sprinkled in with words that sound good (like "platform thinking") but just don't make sense.
Interesting analogy. The future is hard to predict. Hopefully things turn out better than this prediction.
Very interesting read, thanks for sharing.
