"Their work"? First you had the original content creators that did 99.99% of the work. Then you had the US companies bundle it up into a frontier LLM. Then "they" did the "work" of using the US model as a foundation for their own. So in the sense of doing 0.00001% of the actual work that went into their product, sure.
I'd say it's more like someone forking a Linux distro, adding a few themes and fonts, and then complaining when someone else forks their distro and adds another theme.
It isn't. The entirety of the comment I responded to is "Oh no, someone is profiting off of their work without proper attribution!?!?" It's a valid point, but references someone using content created by others for profit. I'm objecting to equating this project with the work done by the original content creators. They're not remotely the same thing.
I understand how the internet works and how people respond to others in this type of setting, but the comment I replied to did not in any way make the point I was making about the disproportionate nature of relative contributions.
> I understand how the internet works and how people respond to others in this type of setting, but the comment I replied to did not in any way make the point I was making about the disproportionate nature of relative contributions.
Do you understand?
Jokes aren’t that funny when you have to dig into an explanation on the nuance of why the hidden meaning doesn’t match the surface meaning in exact degree and proportions. That turns a joke into a pedantic comment. And paradoxically muddies the point by explaining it.
We aren’t morons. We understand that Picasso is doing something on a different level than someone feeding bulk scraped JPGs of paintings into a python script. You really don’t have to explain.
> I understand how the internet works and how people respond to others in this type of setting,
You should frame this as a reminder to be more charitable in your positions because sometimes you can be wrong. This subthread ended being one of the funniest I've read recently.
> The upfront cost is steep and the models you can actually run at home are weaker than what the frontier labs ship, so this only pays off if you can keep the rig busy with long running tasks where a slower, cheaper model grinds away overnight. Most people can’t keep a home machine that loaded, and the hardware you buy today may look like a bad bet in a year.
Oh, so this is not a post about AI coding at home. It's about vibe coding at home.
There's a lot I disagree with in this post, but I'm posting this from a home computer with 64 GB of RAM and no GPU. I do lots of AI coding while spending very little money. I run Gemma 4 26b (mixture of experts) and Qwen 3 coder with Ollama. I use Github Copilot code completions. I use the Gemini and Mistral API free tiers. I have a Gemini paid API account. It's now prepaid, so you don't have to worry about an accidental $1000 bill. You can do a lot of things with Gemini Flash Lite 3.1.
None of this is burning through tokens to create an expensive blob of spaghetti code, but it does qualify as AI coding.
There are certain things you can leave running for a while. I think the distinction between vibe coding and hitl based coding routines will blur as workflows prove themselves and models become smarter and less expensive. Most of the best engineers I know have transitioned a lot more into vibe coding this year. The possibilities are much better nowadays.
> I think the distinction between vibe coding and hitl based coding routines will blur as workflows prove themselves
There's far less need for what the author refers to as frontier models as soon as you move away from vibe coding to filling in the gaps that you don't want to write yourself. The author doesn't even consider Gemini models to be frontier.
> models become smarter and less expensive
That's optimistic. They might become smarter but I don't see any market forces in the next few years that will make them cheaper.
My sentiments too. I'm using Qwen 3.6 35B A3B on a machine with 64Gb ram and a 24GB 5090 (an Alienware 16 Area51 I bought, serendipitously, about 15 seconds before the idiots preordered all computers for the next 3 years and ruined everything).
You can't "slop cannon" vibe code with it, but this is personal code I want to not be spaghetti, so I'm not trying to vibe code. I just want to get instant retrieval of all stack overflow and reddit posts in a chat box, and for it to be able to spare me the physical pain of actually having to type out typescript code (I am a BE dev with negative patience for all frontend) and fuck around endlessly debugging obscure docker problems (I like docker, but, no patience for it having annoying problems and endless quirks). And this model does that really well.
The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.
> I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.
I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.
The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.
You either pay with your wallet, or you pay with you time, attention and advertising profiles created around you. $120 is about 2 hours of my time, Kagi easily saves me that in a year through it's ability to block sites, no ads, ans no having to worry about my searches being saved forever and sold to insurance and future employers.
Honestly, it's hard to see how Arch is a usable distro for most potential users without AUR. If you want a large selection of official packages, the Debian world is going to be the better choice.
Obviously usages vary greatly, but I doubt it's that of big deal for majority of Arch users (maybe it's different for Arch derived distros). My AUR maintained package count has been in single digits for decades (both on my home PC and work station), and I don't think it as a heavy burden to update those packages.
There's a certain selection bias going on here -- I drop AUR packages if they become too annoying (if they require updates too frequently or they want a slew of other AUR only packages as dependencies), I either find alternatives or alternative sources for them (e.g. flathub).
Arch still hits the sweet spot for me -- unobtrusive, close to upstream, and well-documented enough to keep full control over your own system. Both for the times when you want to go with the most default path and for the cases when you want to deviate and go play in the weeds.
I think the issue with AUR is that you get your foot in the door with packages like spotify[1]. It does its magic to allow you to install a .deb package on your distro. I don't know how else to install the Spotify desktop app without AUR. But once you're willing to do that, why not go a little further and trust other packages?
Now, someone could argue that the Spotify app isn't important, but there's a reason it has 268 votes. A better solution would be having packages like spotify in their own repo, and a separate, you-better-verify repo for the rest.
I don't have it installed, so I can't comment if it requires constant babysitting, but looks pretty okay to me -- it has no AUR-only dependencies (++), one extra shell script (--), popular (++ given enough eyeballs...). Should be fairly easy to review, anything fishy should be fairly visible in git diff. If I needed it I would be using this PKGBUILD. It's a net gain that it exists there, someone else done most of the work for me.
> Now, someone could argue that the Spotify app isn't important, but there's a reason it has 268 votes. A better solution would be having packages like spotify in their own repo, and a separate, you-better-verify repo for the rest.
I mean yeah, but everything is trade off of volunteer + user attention. There is no trusted user™ who uses spotify, so it's not in official packages. So you as user need to maintain it yourself or rely on AUR and verify.
That is not true, there are plenty of non-FOSS packages in extra/multilib (e.g steam, discord, nvidia). The only criteria is if there is an interested packager to maintain it.
>The large number of packages and build scripts in the various Arch Linux repositories offer free and open source software for those who prefer it, as well as proprietary software packages for those who embrace functionality over ideology.
So what's a solution to this? Install packages like this in Docker containers without network access? I don't think we should assume it's limited to AUR. Every software source should be considered suspect in 2026, particularly with the adoption of vibe coding, and closed software is a bigger mess than open source because it's a black box.
As much as I hate to say it, the Qubes OS people were right. The solution is aggressively isolating apps into virtual machines. Anyone know how much my battery life is going to suffer if I bite the bullet and switch?
Anyone relying on a steady paycheck from an employer should panic a bit all the time, because nothing can save them from bad management. The reference to Jevons Paradox doesn't say anything about individual managers responding correctly. If 30% of managers screw up, that's a lot of collateral damage.
Now to respond to your actual point, I don't think software developers should panic. Even if pure software engineering gets hit hard, I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where years of software development skills plus knowledge in a specific domain isn't a good thing for current software developers. This is unlike what happened with international trade, where you had 60-year old textile workers losing their jobs, no alternative jobs, and no policy being offered to compensate them for the effects of trade.
I don't see LOC as that different from number of hours in the office. They'd always say pre-pandemic "If they're not in the office, how will I know they're working?" Simple, use the output metrics that you use to evaluate all of your workers to see what they contribute to the business.
I'd say it's more like someone forking a Linux distro, adding a few themes and fonts, and then complaining when someone else forks their distro and adds another theme.
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