I have a bad feeling that this almost-free code era is not going to last.
Right now I can hand a coding agent a problem, let it work through a repository, and get back an amount of labor that would have been financially ridiculous for one person to buy a few years ago. It is not actually free. There is a subscription, hardware somewhere, electricity, and quite a lot of my time spent describing, checking, and correcting the work. But I can rent frontier-level programming help for the price of a streaming bundle, and the amount of code I can attempt for that money is still absurd.
That feels temporary.
Prices could go up, or the best models could end up on plans I can’t justify as an individual. Regulation or energy limits might change what is available too. It could also happen gradually, with the affordable tier falling further behind. I don’t know which of those is likely. I just don’t want to assume I’ll always have the access I have now.
Big businesses and governments will still be able to buy the machines, the power, the data, and the access. Individuals will get whatever can be made safe, cheap, and profitable enough to sell to us. That may remain astonishingly capable. It may also mean the period I am working in now turns out to have been a very short one.
I’m going to keep using cloud models. I’ve spent most of a year finding out what I can build with them, and I want to keep that work: source and history locally, along with the specifications, tests, prompts, and process notes. I want the application to run without the agent and to be able to change models without rebuilding my whole workflow.
And then there are local models.
Local hardware and electricity cost money too, and a model that fits on my desk may lag far behind one in a data center. I don’t expect it to replace everything I use.
I do want a local option that keeps working when a subscription changes or a product closes. It can also work on private code without sending it elsewhere. I’m willing to put up with some loss of speed or capability for that.
I am going to keep using the almost-free code while it is here. I am also going to keep the code, the context around it, and as much of the machinery as I can on computers I control.