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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

HackerNews, the site when someone posts about their business for developer tooling, there is always a bunch of folks posting links about half implemented alternatives, because who wants to pay for tooling like any other professionals?

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This is also completely self inflicted. This is one of the only professions that does not want to pay for their tools and will do anything to get it for free, including building it themselves.

So this is quite unsurprising that open source developers have become this decade's new starving artists asking for donations for their "free software" only for a coding agent to do it for close to $0.

Perhaps, but it is also the way in which LLM providers eat their seed corn. If everyone publishes less because the only one to consume it will be an LLM gives no credit, then LLMs will lose training material over time.

Is there some magical utopian profession where people want to pay for tooling? Like, I'm sure there are people/groups who spend more on tools, like say, all the plumbers and carpenters buying $600 dewalt drills or whatever, but I'm having trouble with the idea that they want to do that.

If programmers, on average, don't pay very much for tooling, the magic of capitalism tells me that's because the tools aren't worth very much.

You don't need $600 dewalt drills to open holes for most carpenter's.

Ah, but we used to pay, and many of us still do, because as programmers, some of us also like to earn salaries, we don't get to buy groceries with pull requests.

What exactly is the argument here? All programmers should buy programming tools because otherwise programmers will starve to death?

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