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).
We all use proprietary hardware, proprietary firmware. A lot of free software users don't even run free software operating systems - they run some free software on top of Windows or MacOS or Android or (in the past) proprietary UNIX. That does not make the free software itself less free.
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.
Any community is good by itself. But the actual goal of the movement always was to give users more freedom. A community is a side-effect. A pleasant one, but still just a side-effect. If LLM coding gives more users more freedom, then it would be fully consistent with the goals of the free software community to embrace (and extend) the LLMs.
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.
Not all code needs to be shared or benefits from being shared or provides benefits to others when it is shared. There is a *lot* of code that is only ever useful for one user, one company, one computer. And that is great. The more other software structures enable this kind of hyper-local free software, the more freedom users have. Collaboration, maintainership, policies, ... are simply not relevant to local code.
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.
You should see what computer Linus uses to work on the Linux kernel. His main workstation plus laptop cost at least as much. And yet, we all know, that it can also be done in a much cheaper way. It just all depends on what you want to do and and how fast you want to do that.
But in a more practical example, there are AMD XT 7900 cards with 20Gb RAM for around 700€ that can run decently sized models with reasonable speed. For similar price one can also find used Apple Mac mini with an M-series processor and 32Gb of unified RAM. That can run even larger models but a bit slower.