Comment by FitchApps

It does sound like a wonderful life... but if you want to have a family, you'll need to put down roots somewhere. I know a nomad who ended up doing this in Mexico - he'd never have guessed it years prior - and is super happy. So maybe, as a way of finding the country you're "meant" to live in, it's a nice approach. I think it's a younger person's game, though.

There's a whole movement that does this.

https://digitalnomads.world/

It means having no friends.

> Meanwhile I’ve lost roughly a month from internet issues.

If you tell me "I lost internet at home and couldn't work there", it's one thing. But that you simply went about a month without internet connection, I find it hard to believe.

How much of that was in the last ten years? And do you make any attempt to have a backup system (phone hotspot, for example)?

I've been on ChatGPT Pro plan since introduced, and also used codex-rs since it was made public, never hit a limit. Came close last week, not sure if the limits were recently introduced or there always was but they got lowered, but I think that's as close to "unlimited" as you can get without running your own inference.

I've tried Anthropic's Max plan before, but hit limits after just a couple of hours, same with Google's stuff, but wasn't doing anything radically different when I tried those, compared with Codex, so seems other's limits are way lower.

I finally bit the bullet and got a $200 Claude subscription last month. It's been a busy month and I've used it a lot. More than is healthy, more than I sustainably could for more than a few weeks. I've managed to hit a 5 hour limit exactly once (20 minutes before it refreshed) and I've never hit more than 80% of a weekly limit.

But if I did - and I could imagine having some specific highly parallelizable work like writing a bazillion unit tests where I send out 40 subagents at a time - then the solution would be to buy two subscriptions. Not switch to API billing.

That's a very different problem than OP

You should keep physical books, food, and medication for a SHTF scenario

"Back to Basics", "Where There Is No Doctor" and the Bible are my SHTF books

You won't be coding in a SHTF scenario.

If it's any consolation, Bavaria is a beautiful part of the world that's up there with any tropical island or rainforest. I hope to visit again sometime.

Do you know how many times since 1999 I have had my work Internet go down? Definitely not enough to spend time worrying about it. The world didn’t stop.

In 2022, funny enough I was at an AWS office (I worked remotely when I worked there) working in ProServe, us-east-1 was having issues that was affecting everything, guess what we all did? Stopped working, the world didn’t come to an end.

Even now that I work from home, on the rare occasions that Internet goes down, I just use my phone if I need to take a Zoom call.

i think its more like what if ur gps isnt working but you're just supposed to drive down the block

The models are already made. They can just run the very useful models they have indefinitely, and they’d be profitable. Or when they go under someone else can buy the rights to the weights.

Anthropic, a common coding model provider, has said that their models generate enough cash to cover their own training costs before the next one is released. If they stopped getting massive investments, they should be able to coast with the models they have.

I look at this as cost savings waiting to happen. Nvidia extorts companies to the extent of tens of thousands for a GPU. Somebody's going to undercut them. At the same time, people are working on optimizations as well. Using cheap CPUs for inference instead of expensive GPUs. Doesn't work for anything but if your model is small enough you can get away with it. Using lower bit quantization makes the models cheaper to run. Using hacks like prompt caching makes subsequent calls more efficient. Etc.

Your base assumption is that it is expensive and therefore these companies will eventually fail when they keep on making less money than they are spending. The reality is that they are indeed spending enormously now and making a lot of very non linear progress. At the same time a lot of that stuff is being widely published and quite a lot of it is open source. At some point you might get consolidation and maybe some companies indeed don't make it. But their core tech will survive. Investors might be crying in a corner. But that won't stop people from continuing to use the tech in some form or another.

I already have a laptop that can some modestly largish models locally. I'm not going to spend 40K or whatever on something that can run a GPT 5 class model. But it's not going to cost that in a few years either. This tech is here to stay. We might pay more or less for it. The current state is the worst it is ever going to be. It's going to be faster, bigger, better, cheaper, more useful, etc. At some point the curves flatten and people might start paying attention to cost more. Maybe don't burn a lot of gas in expensive and inefficient gas generators (as opposed to more efficient gas power plants) and maybe use cheap wind/solar instead. Maybe get some GPUs from a different vendor at a lower price? Maybe take a look at algorithm efficiencies, etc. There is a lot of room for optimization in this market. IMHO surviving companies will be making billions, will be running stuff at scale, and will be highly profitable.

Maybe some investors won't get their money back. Shit happens. That's why it's called venture capital. The web bubble bursting didn't kill the web either.

I see what you're saying, but it doesn't matter that much in the long run. If everything stopped right now, the state-of-the-art open source models can still solve a lot of problems. They may never solve coding, per se, but they're good enough.

Billionaires trying to hurt each other. Facebook released LLaMa hoping to hasten OpenAI's bankruptcy.

Because to a first approximation, no one wants desktop software, maintenance is a pain, it’s a pain to distribute across a large organization and people want to use the same app across devices and no one will pay me for it.

> But more importantly, let's suppose your software does require an Internet connection to function.

Because I have been able to depend on “fast” internet since 2000 both at home and at work, just like I’ve been able to depend on a compiler since 1992? There is nothing so important that can’t wait in the rare chance that internet goes out.

> Why should that imply a requirement for a code generation tool to have one

Because I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars to run a frontier model locally when I can spend $20/month and codex is included with my ChatGPT subscription?

> Teachers don't know always understand why things are being taught.

Yes, but I don't think that is the actual bottleneck, even when they do, most children probably don't care about abstract goals, but rather about immediate skills in their everyday life, or just the statement, that they will need it.

Read the second line. If you can't generalize then I can't help you. Have good faith (and obtain a sense of humor).

Or I can just take a break, go to the gym downstairs, etc …

Before you go on about kids these days, my first time coding was on an Apple //e in assembly.

You can check out https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1piq11p/mac_wit... for a sentiment of usefulness and the specs of the machines running it. It will be some variation of Max or Ultra level Apple silicon, and around 64GB or more RAM. Oh, and an HN submission from 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856489

Copilot comparison:

Intelligence: Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is widely considered the first open-source model to reach GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet levels of coding proficiency. While Copilot (using GPT-4o) remains highly reliable, Qwen often produces more concise code and can outperform cloud models in specific tasks like code repair.

Latency: Local execution on an M3 Max provides near-zero network latency, resulting in faster "start-to-type" responses than Copilot, which must round-trip to the cloud.

Reliability: Copilot is an all-in-one "vibe" that integrates deeply into VS Code. Qwen requires local tools like Ollama or MLX-LM and a plugin like Continue.dev to achieve the same UX.

GPT-Codex:

Intelligence & Reasoning: In recent 2025–2026 benchmarks, the Qwen3-Coder series has emerged as the strongest open-source performer, matching the "pass@5" resolution rates of flagship models like GPT-5-High. While OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.1-Codex-Max remains the overall leader in complex, project-wide autonomous engineering, Qwen is frequently cited as the better choice for local, file-specific logic.

Architecture & Efficiency: OpenAI models like GPT-OSS-20b (a Mixture-of-Experts model) are optimized for extreme speed and tool-calling. However, the M3 Max with 64GB is powerful enough to run the Qwen3-Coder-30B or 32B models at full fidelity, which provides superior logic to OpenAI's smaller "mini" or "OSS" models.

Context Window: Qwen models offer substantial context (up to 128K–256K tokens), which is comparable to OpenAI’s specialized Codex variants. This allows you to process entire modules locally without the high per-token cost of sending that data to OpenAI's servers.

Sure Claude can write better docs but if you dont write the documentation yourself you wont fully know the codebase. I would argue write docs and then have Claude critique it. Then adjust.

PMs could have chosen to do this before, though. Sure, LLMs obviously empower them but the main reason you have developers is to have someone to be accountable to, and they thus have to be extra careful and thoughtful about the code they write. The PMs could come up with adhoc fixes but unless they're also willing to be on the hook for the code, then it's not terribly useful organizationally imo

Well, if they make the decision to accept the suggestion and it's wrong, that's on them. But if you do, that's on you. LLM? How can your boss blame the LLM? Like yelling at it?

This doesn't really seem to be the point? Op is being prescriptive, talking about what we should do, not about what could be done.

Apply to anything else: you could eat out at restaurants every night, and it would do a great job in feeding you! Think of all the productivity you would gain relying on agential chefs. With restaurants even I can eat like a French chef, they have truly democratized food. And they do a perfect job these days executing dishes, only some mistakes.

Yes, and when you do want to share with your colleagues `git push /media/user/usb` takes a few seconds and plugging an Ethernet cable into both computers and disabling ufw takes a few minutes (when you need to find a cable first).

it's only an example for a rhetorical question