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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

No. The "golden" end state of coding agents is free and open source coding agents running on my machine (or in whatever machine I want). Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal? For every `ls`, `ps`, `kill`? No sense, right? Well, same for LLMs.

I'm not saying "ban propietary LLMs", I'm saying: hackers (the ones that used to read sites like this) should have as their main tools free and open source ones.

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> Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal?

Yes, because hardware and electricity aren't free.

I literally DO pay for every command. I just don't get an itemized bill so there's no transparency about it. Instead, I made some lump-sum hardware payment which is amortized over the total usage I get out of it, plus some marginal increase in my monthly electric bill when I use it.

Sure but the same thing would apply to the original comment, only that it's a locally hosted LLM that you're buying electricity for. That's different than paying rent for the privilege of using those commands and being at the mercy of the providers who choose to modify or EOL those commands as they see fit.

I agree with the sentiment, but isn’t Claude Code (the CLI) FOSS already? (Not sure it’s coupled to Claude the model API either, but if it is I imagine it’s not too hard to fix.)

Claude Code is closed source and Anthropic does take downs of decompilations.

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