> “wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just figure out how

Except this time it’s “if I can just figure out how and pay for the Claude API usage”.

This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.

Yes, they can still write code the manual way, but if the norm is to use AI I suspect that beginner’s guides, tutorials, etc. will become less common.

There has generally always been some barrier. Computer access, internet access, books etc. If AI coding stays around, which looks like it will, it will just be the current generations barrier.

I don’t think it is sad at all. There are barriers to all aspects of life, life is not fair and at least in our lifetimes will never be. The best anyone can do is to help those around them and not get caught up the slog of the bad things happening in the world.

Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for

Very true. One of the greatest aspects of the field is how accessible it is, and that is certainly going to get worse with LLM usage.

I'd probably be toiling away in a less productive industry if I hadn't been able to easily download Python and start learning it for free.

They're not that expensive for anyone that has the tech skills to actually make good use out of them. I've been paying around with Claude Code, using API credits rather than the monthly fee. It costs about $5 per one-hour session. If you're going to be doing this professionally it's worth springing for the $100/month membership to avoid hitting credit limits, but if you just want to try it out, you can do so without breaking the bank.

A bigger question for me is "Does this actually increase my productivity?" The jury is still out on that - I've found that you really need to babysit the algorithm and apply your CS knowledge, and you also have to be very clear about what you're going to tell it later, don't let it make bad assumptions, and in many cases spell out the algorithm in detail. But it seems to be very good at looking up API details, writing the actual code, and debugging (if you guide it properly), all things that take a non-trivial amount of tedium in everyday programming.

yes indeed, who will pay? I run a lot through open models locally using LM Studio and Ollama, and it is nice to only be spending a tiny amount of extra money for electricity.

I am retired and not wanting to spend a ton of money getting locked long term into using an expensive tool like Claude Code is a real thing. It is also more fun to sample different services. Don’t laugh but I am paying Ollama $20/month just to run gpt-oss-120b very fast on their (probably leased) hardware with good web search tooling. Is it worth $20/month? Perhaps not but I enjoy it.

I also like cheap APIs: Gemini 2.5-flash, pro when needed, Kimi K2, open models on Groq, etc.

The AI, meaning LLM, infrastructure picture is very blurred because of so many companies running at a loss - which I think should be illegal because long term I think it is misleading consumers.

>the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.

Considering opportunity cost, a young person paying $20 or $100 per month to Claude API access is way cheaper than a young person spending a couple of years to learn to code, and some months coding something the AI can spit in 10 minutes.

AI coding will still create generations that even programming graduates know fuck all about how to code, and are also bad at reasoning about the AI produced code they depend on or thinking systematically (and that wont be getting any singularity to bail them out), but that's beside the point.

> This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary

Agreed. And on the one hand you have those who pay an AI to produce a lot of code, and on the other hand you have those who have to review that code. I already regularly review code that has "strange" issues, and when I say "why does it do this?" the answer is "the AI did it".

Of course, one can pay for the AI and then review and refactor the code to make it good, but my experience is that most don't.

I agree that access is a problem now, but I think it is one that hardware improvements will solve very quickly. We are a few generations of Strix Halo type hardware away from effortlessly running very good LLMs locally. (It's already possible, but the hardware is about $2000 and the LLMs you can run are good but not very good.) AFAIK AMD have not released the roadmap for Medusa Halo, but the rumours [1] are increased CPU and GPU performance, and increased bandwidth. Another iteration or two of this will make Strix Halo hardware more affordable, and the top-of-the-line models will be beasts for local LLMs.

[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Powerful-Zen-6-Medusa-Halo-iGP...

LLMs are quickly becoming cheaper. Soon they will be “cheap as free,” to quote Homestar Runner. Then programming will be solved, no need for meatbags. Enjoy the 2-5 years we have left in this profession.

One can create a free Google account and use Gemini for free.

Or think it this way: It's easy to get base level free LLM (Toyota) but one should not expect free top of the shelf (Porsche).

Does anyone have a good recommendation of a claude code like tool that uses locally hosted models?

Eh back in the day computers were expensive and not everyone could afford one (and I don't mean a library computer that you can work on, one you can code and hack on). The ubiquity of computing is not something that's been around forever.

There have always been costs and barriers for the cutting edge.

Maybe local models can address this, but for me the issue is that relying on LLMs for coding introduces gatekeepers.

> Uh oh. We're getting blocked again and I've heard Anthropic has a reputation for shutting down even paid accounts with very few or no warnings.

I'm in the slack community where the author shared their experiment with the autonomous startup and what stuck out to me is that they stopped the experiment out of fear of being suspended.

Something that is fun should not go hand-in-hand with fear of being cut off!

You made me realize exactly why I love skill-based video games, and shun the gacha games (especially those with PvP). You swiped to gain power over players who don't. Yay?

The knowledge check will also slowly transfer towards the borders of fast iteration and not necessarily knowledge depth. The end goal is to make a commodity out of the myth of the 10x dev, and take more leverage away from the devs.

This is a pro for a lot of the people whom AI people are targeting: idiots with money.