Le lundi, 3 août 2026, 14.49:22 h heure d’été d’Europe centrale Lucas Nussbaum
a écrit :
> Personal anecdote:
> I was looking for an application to help a child with learning
> multiplication tables (clearly a boring thing to learn that children
> go through between ages 6 and 8). There are plenty of such apps on
> Android and Apple's app stores, and also educational games such as
> GCompris (free software and packaged in Debian), but none of them really
> matched my needs. I wanted something simple and focused on
> multiplication tables, with the ability to select which tables to learn,
> define whether I wanted questions like 4x5=? or 4x?=20, etc. Also I
> wanted different game modes (streak mode, timer).
>
> I ended up vibe-coding such an app, together with the target user.
One way to look at this is that you used a 2026 proprietary Software-as-a-
Service to produce a piece of software for yourself (and relatives). Said SaaS
comes with enormous externalities, but happens to be currently cheap-enough
for your level of revenue. The result, although most certainly useful for what
you set out to do, is very likely a single-user, one-shot, throw-away software
project. It achieved what you wanted to and you moved on. I'm certainly not
blaming anyone for doing things like this. But I don't see this very
differently from early DreamViewer or FrontPage uses: some users managed to
pull off very convincing software with these dubious tools.
One important point for me here is that I grew convinced that the Free
Software movement is much more about the _movement_ that about the software.
In other words: I care about the Debian project primarily because it's a
project of commons (we build something collectively, and it benefits all), and
only secondarily because it happens to be good software. (I'm well aware that
not everyone in the project sorts these two arguments in the same order,
that's likely why we have a vote).
To get back to your anecdote above: you built useful software, but you didn't
build a community. Again, no offense meant: not all software needs a
community, pushing to Github doesn't imply collaboration, etc. But I find that
it's a too common trait of LLM-produced code: it's only good code.
But as a software project, we should care about how we collaborate, how the
code we produce can be understood by others, how we can make it evolve to meet
new needs, how maintainership can be passed around when interests shift, etc.
That's why we have common tools, a Policy, certain rules, etc. As LLMs tend to
increase the amount of code (we can produce more, faster), they don't inflate
the rest of the ecosystem accordingly.
A counterpoint to the above "it's just a massive proprietary SaaS offering
currently cheap-enough" is that we have (or will have) open-{source,weight}
LLM models that we can "just run ourselves". Right.
An article from Micah Lee posted yesterday [0] about agentic coding had this
excerpt:
> I have a Framework Desktop server with 128GB of RAM.
… and that's just the most recent article I stumbled upon (so I'm not picking
specifically at Micah). That setup is at least 3'600 USD as of today. Can we
acknowledge that this really is a lot of money for most people anywhere on
earth, and totally out of any budgeting reality for 90%+ of the world's
population? Sure, it's _possible_ to run some LLMs locally, for some people,
but let's face it; it's an enormous situational privilege to even be thinking
about doing so for almost everyone.
It's the same when talking about SaaS offers (I don't like the "frontier
models" lingo; let's name things as they are: these are paid-for API
services): it's quite common to read statements such as "I'm only spending
300 USD/month in AI services". Sure; with one's US or EU engineer's salary, it
might not be a lot. But if this kind of money is required to take part if the
free software movement, we _will_ be excluding large portions of the world to
even participate. From the financial aspect of the AI "market", it looks quite
probable that access to these SaaS offers will just keep getting more
expensive.
( To be clear: universal access to computers has always been an issue, but I'm
confident it got overall better over time: broadband availability, cheap(er)
and better laptops, a large second-hand market, etc. )
I want a Debian project to which it's _easier_ to participate to, not harder.
And I'm afraid that allowing LLM usage will deepen a divide between "those who
can afford the price of LLMs" and "those who are stuck with just their aging
laptop at hand" (caricature intended).
--
OdyX
[0] https://micahflee.com/agentic-coding-techniques/
