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Comment by not_kurt_godel | Hacker News Reader

> Having a machine that can run some modest local LLMs, like the Gemma 4 12B, is really worth it.

Agree having a powerful machine is really worth it in general for professionals, but strong disagree that running local LLMs has anything to do with it. It's hard enough as it is getting a good ROI on your time/money prompting/wrangling with frontier models. IMO leaning on the comparatively limited capabilities of local LLMs is best avoided in favor of keeping your own personal coding skills fresh and continuing to learn new ones.

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I'm not that bothered about my coding skills, which are fine, and pretty up-to-date considering I'm now an old bloke. I am bothered about building an instinctive understanding that helps me deal with my anxieties and decide whether I want to carry on with this working life or quit.

I needed to do this, this way, in my own time, to put my brain back together. It has worked for me, which is why I recommend it.

YMMV.

Unfortunately the local llm bunch is not the most emphatetic one in my experience: you are somehow "expected" to immediately know all this stuff and god forbid you ask the wrong question. I've never seen or felt this level of bullying and weird vibes over tools and LLM models. "My setup works for you or beat it".

There's also a lot of cargo-cult stuff, isn't there? Especially in the Reddit groups. Just do XYZ. And people ask why and they are never around to explain. Because, perhaps, they can't.

(Very reminiscent of 3D printing, where you get a lot of very trivial advice poorly applied, which is an analogy I've now made several times.)

Several of the youtubers are pretty helpful, though; I watched half a dozen things and absorbed the broad pattern and then went for it.

Also I got a lot out of reading HN comments, which is why I am here; tucked away in the corners of these discussions are people who can help. Over time I hope I am one.

Where has that been your experience? My experience interacting with people about this is almost entirely in HN threads like this one, and I haven't found what you're saying here to be the case.

But if this is the case, as you say, it seems like a good opportunity to build a more welcoming set of entry points into this!

Continuing to learn new ones, like what?

To me, "how do contemporary AI systems work and interact with contemporary hardware and how can I best take advantage of their capabilities?" is the set of skills that are worth learning at this moment.

What else is there? New / additional programming languages? New / additional database systems? frameworks? orchestrators? cloud provider / infra tooling? architectural patterns?

I dunno, all of this seems really boring and "been there done that" to me at this moment in time!

Yes, that all tracks, and all of those skills are worth maintaining and improving. Great to tinker with LLMs locally hands-on to learn, and having a powerful enough machine to enable that to a reasonable degree is just one of many reasons why it's worth it. I'm just saying that IMO "how can I best take advantage" lands firmly in the bucket of only cloud-hosted frontier models being worth my time. I would speculate that holds true for a large portion of the wider HN audience but YMMV of course.

Maybe. I felt this way a year ago and definitely two years ago. But now my sense is that it's played out at this point, and the valuable thing to build expertise on now - precisely because I think it's coming rather than here - is local / open weights / hybrid models and harnesses.

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