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You can accomplish quite a lot with smaller local models on reasonably priced pro tier hardware (not cheap hardware, but very attainable hardware for anyone making average software engineer money). Qwen 3.6 27B and 35BA3, Gemma 28B, and so on are incredibly beneficial even if Anthropic and OpenAI produce better options.

Failing that, GLM 5.2 is open weights, trades blows with current frontier models and widely available on commodity inference providers. And you could run it yourself if you do actually have the resources.

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Even with locally runnable small "open" models you are relying on scraps of others. They are much worse at the LLM game and you don't know when they stop releasing the weights.

How can you go the opposite direction? Instead of using LLMs to produce more code, can you produce less, maybe higher abstraction code?

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If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this.

You'll also recognize that the problem is not AI in general or LLMs in particular, but the proprietary entities that control the best models.

That's the part HN'ers seem to have the most trouble with. They protest AI qua AI, as if that's somehow going to help, when they should be fighting for independent development and universal access.

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> when they should be fighting for independent development and universal access.

Because it’s literally not going to happen. The existence of LLMs is a function of how much capital you have. Frontier models require so many resources to train and run that they are functionally inaccessible to the average person.

That’s why capital loves them! It’s a resources play.

You’re also conveniently leaving out all of the other negative aspects of LLMs/GenAI with regards to the arts, open communication, etc..

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"they should be fighting for independent development and universal access". Well stated.
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I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing.

I only snark at those who try to mislabel that thing as something useful. Which it is not.

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I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing.

That's why they call us "hackers," and they call you something else.

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