pyeri

Consumerism is the idea that encourages the continuous acquisition of goods and services by ordinary plebs. Consequently, the solutions to a problem many LLMs present are also geared towards maximum spending, they won't present a budget, non-premium or a free solution even if one exists. They might elaborate if you ask about it specifically but rarely come up on their own. The default option is always the most pricey or premium option. Did any of you notice that with specific LLMs?

If you trace the timeline of how LLMs went from a technologist's dream to early text-generation toys, to the world-shifting launch of ChatGPT, and finally to the daily drivers of modern programming (Sonnet, Opus), it has taken less than a decade. It’s a thrilling, almost unbelievable tale.

Let's look at how we got here, and the wall the industry is currently hitting.

- The Dream Phase (2010-2016). By the dawn of the last decade (2011), an interesting thing was happening. The two platforms, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, had started gaining tremendous traction, folks were collaborating on these platforms to openly exchange knowledge. Looking back, this feels like a more ideal, community-driven path for humanity — one we abandoned for the centralized architecture we have today.

- The Disruption Phase (2016-2021). A perfect storm of unrelated events paved the way for AI. By 2017, new programmers were growing deeply frustrated by Stack Overflow's rigid policies, subjective question rejections, and senior coder pedantry. In retrospect, those strict moderators carved the first stones of what would later become Copilot and ChatGPT. If the community won't answer a beginner's question without downvoting it, a private LLM gladly will.

Add to this Google's landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" which unlocked the Transformer architecture, and the forced isolation of COVID-19 in 2020. The ground was suddenly fertile for virtual assistants that could act as isolated developers' programming partners.

- The Hook Phase (2023-2025). The launch of ChatGPT left no doubt about how easy the "hook" would be. For non-technical folks, it was pure magic. It didn't take long for specialized LLMs like Copilot, Claude and Deepseek to become an indispensable part of the programmer's toolbox. Meanwhile, OpenAI was still advertising its "non-profit" roots, and the consensus was that this was purely about empowering humanity.

- The Endgame Phase (2025-present/future). AI companies had miscalculated a lot of things by this time. They were optimizing for the "long-term" but as John Maynard Keynes rightly said many years ago, "In the long-term, we are all dead". The VCs are losing patience today because while the technology itself has gained massive ubiquity and appreciation, the revenues aren't coming as fast. The hook had sort of worked but failed to fully work.

Most frontier models like Sonnet, Opus and GPT 5.5 are still running on 'subsidized mode'. The amount of monthly subscription they charge users (USD 10/20/30 per month) is a pittance compared to all the compute and RAM needed to run those "thinking..." and "pondering..." tokens. In order to truly show profits in the books and come out of subsidized mode, they must charge on the scaling of input/output tokens and that appears to be difficult. Very few companies might be able to sustain such unlimited budget for unpredictable hardware scaling, the recent Uber story shows exactly what happens when they try doing this.

The frontier models are trying to replace something which could never be successfully delegated or automated in entire human history - the highest cognitive skills of human brain like reasoning, deduction and logic. Yet, the efforts are on and the goals are long term. The conundrum is that if they stop subsidizing, the hook phase may be undone - there is a strong possibility of folks reverting back to older ways of Wikipedia/Stack Overflow or pivot entirely to open source dry/academic models like Llama and Qwen which can run locally on their own hardware. And yet, they also can't keep subsidizing and draining the funds indefinitely.

What happens when the subsidy mirror cracks?

Tailwind is the hot topic these days, and 9 out of 10 developers will probably suggest (or even force!) you to use Tailwind over Bootstrap. However, here are some logical and rational reasons why Bootstrap is actually the better framework:

1. Easier learning curve. Bootstrap 5 doesn't assume deep expertise in frontend design. The fact that backend developers can implement it easily without learning arcane concepts like state management or virtual DOM is highly underestimated.

2. Highly Utilitarian. While tailwind markets itself as a "utility first" framework, Bootstrap offers real utility without all the extra fuss. Navbars, modal popups, utility classes for colors and accents like `bg-primary`, `bg-secondary`, etc.— are all built-in and ready to use. How much more utilitarian could you get?

3. Creativity within Uniformity. This point is more about psychology than technology. One of the biggest criticisms of Bootstrap is that "most Bootstrap-built sites look similar". But this is a subjective opinion and ignores the fact that creativity doesn't always equate to reinventing the entire wheel. You can still be creative with configuring a wheel's spokes, tyre colors, tube pressure, etc. on an assembly line - In fact, such creativity is ideal when it helps increase productivity while delivering a standardized, user-friendly experience.

PS: Which one feels simpler and more utilitarian to you?

- Tailwind: `<button class="bg-sky-500 hover:bg-sky-600 active:bg-sky-700 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-lg">Click me</button>` - Bootstrap: `<button class="btn-primary">Click me</button>`

Has web development reached its saturation? The present popular consensus is that "jquery is old, react is new". But as time passes and years turn into decades, the relative difference between jquery and react will become less important, they're both quite old from today's perspective.

Of course, there is AI, data science, blockchain, etc. but those are different fields. Has webdev itself turned into something like civil or mechanical engineering - a matured field with steady work but less song and dance?

Only two kinds of engineers climb the success ladder in today's cut-throat IT environment (especially in India):

1. The people pleaser types who know how to use the right technical vocabulary, massage the ego of superiors, attend parties, etc. They typically grow into project managers and IDU heads.

2. The dependency creator types who isn't just a nerd but also knows how to keep control of their systems in their own hands, share only little or ambiguous information rather than open source all knowledge, maybe even fake bugs every now and then to signal who really controls the show, etc. These grow into software architects, CTOs and other roles.

If you aren't one of these two types, a long-term career in corporate IT isn't really for you. You might gain some experience for a while but eventually end up being used or becoming punch bags for these other two types.

As I understand, the popular consensus today is that nginx+php-fpm performs faster than apache even with the mpm_event process management enabled?

But when it comes to real world usage, many production instances I observe these days still deploy apache a lot. Even cpanel based web hosting (shared or dedicated instances) are more often apache based than nginx.

Is it due to some old habits and dependence on apache specific features like .htaccess support? Or is it the case that apache has actually caught up in the race with ngnix and the performance difference is quite negligible these days?

Here is my open challenge to all vibe coding proponents who think this way of software development with LLM prompting as the only or primary means actually works.

Show or cite me at least one open source non-trivial app (Desktop or Web) which is usable and proven (at least a few thousand github stars) - and built entirely using vibe coding.

If you can show me such a project, I'll be a convert and start changing my view towards LLMs and take vibe coding (and even AI assistance in programming) a lot more seriously.

I'm a freelance web developer who develops apps and services for this local client, they're interested in shifting all cloud dependencies from foreign based services like Amazon AWS/EC2 to locally based companies here in India.

I'm aware that AWS already offers local instances here at Mumbai and Hyderabad (ap-south-1/2) but they want to remove foreign dependency completely for whatever reason.

My understanding is that most Indian cloud services are just in their infancy at this stage and still act as resellers of global providers like AWS or Alibaba Cloud, thus making them nothing more than costly middle-men or arbitrages. When I tried to put forth this point, the client asked me to research purely India based cloud hosting providers who aren't depending on any outside entities for their network infrastructure.

They're even prepared to pay a small premium on the hosting price if such a service exists. Their idea (I think) is to ensure that money is spent in the home country and doesn't leave the shores. If nothing turns out in my research, we might still have to continue using AWS but I want to give this a try at least. Do you know of any such genuine providers?

To be fair, it had already started happening much before AI came when programmer roles started getting commoditized into "Python coder", "PHP scripter", "dotnet developer", etc. Though these exact phrases weren't used in job descriptions, this is how recruiters and clients started referring programmers as such.

But LLMs took it a notch even further, coders have started morphing into LLM prompters today, that is primarily how software is getting produced. They still must baby sit these LLMs presently, reviewing and testing the code thoroughly before pushing it to the repo for CI/CD. A few more years and even that may not be needed as the more enhanced LLM capabilities like "reasoning", "context determination", "illumination", etc. (maybe even "engineering"!) would have become part of gpt-9 or whatever hottest flavor of LLM be at that time.

The problem is that even though the end result would be a very robust running program that reeks of creativity, there won't be any human creativity in that. The phrase dismal science was first used in reference to economics by medieval scholars like Thomas Carlyle. We can only guess their motivations for using that term but maybe people of that time thought that economics was somehow taking away the life force from society of humans, much similar to the way many feel about AI/LLM today?

Now I understand the need for putting food on the table. To survive this cut throat IT job market, we must adapt to changing trends and technologies and that includes getting skilled with LLM. Nonetheless, I can't help but get a very dismal feeling about this new way of software development, don't you?

LLMs like ChatGPT and copilot are like those super saturated junk food like a pizza or burger which feels good in that moment (ready code snippets or answers) but over a period only accumulates weight gain, sugar and diseases (technical debt, brain drain).

We have stopped reading or even looking up official documentation, that has become an extinct skill today. And why would we if an LLM does it for us and tells us only what we need to be told to create that release or fulfill that urgent deadline.

What happened with AWS outage recently is only a brief foreshadow of what might eventually come to pass if this trend continues. Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?

And that’s not even mentioning the replacement of human workers problem which is the most discussed topic these days. Eventually, the senior/mid management will think why do we even need these “prompt engineers”, let an agent do that work. After that, senior management will think why do we need these “prompt managers”, let another agentic AI that controls other agents do it! Eventually, the company will be run entirely by robots and shareholders will enjoy their wealth in peace!

As dystopian as the above scenario sounds, that’s the world we are eventually heading towards with all the progress in AI and the commerce oriented environment it’s evolving in. But it’ll still take decades at least considering the state of prevailing systems in public and private sectors. But until that happens, let us programmers equip ourselves with real old school skills which have stood the test of time - like scavenging documentation, referring to stack overflow and wikipedia for knowledge, etc. and coding with humility and passion, not this LLM crap.