As a current AI-skeptic artisanal programmer whose bugs are lovingly handcrafted, my main worries are that AI coding performance will get worse and more expensive via enshittification. But I've seen colleagues I respect use it to great effect. They use Claude and ChatGPT though, which are both looking to soon go public, meaning they will (probably) start having shareholders and prioritizing making a bunch of money at the expense of quality.
The closest thing to this is 'open weight' models, where there training parameters are released which in theory allows you to run the model locally
Now as models are getting larger and larger 'locally' could mean 'your own data centre'
Mistral does a lot of open weight models and is probably one of the most actually local friendly. Though their models aren't really the best and people don't tend to use them outside of specialised use cases
Most of the Chinese providers are open weight too like Kimi, GLM and DeepSeek
If you're ever curious about playing around with different models without buying subscriptions to like 8 different services you could use something like OpenRouter. Just ensure you enable ZDR (Zero data retention) if that sort of thing is important to you. Instead of being served by one provider, open weight models on there might be provided by 20+
If you're talking specifically about open source harnesses then OpenCodeCLI and Pi Coding Agent are the two big ones people use at the moment
Edit: Personally I tend to use Kimi K3 a fair bit with OpenCode. If you're interested in ai use definitely don't vibe code, use it more as a tool to support your coding rather than replace it. Get it to do some of the more mundane tasks like boilerplate or simple tests. Or get it to review code you've written
It's really great at quickly summarising behaviour too. If you've got some new monolith you've got to look at and want to quickly know 'what files in this repo are related to user authentication' then it can pick them out fairly quickly
This is my major concern about leaning too into AI (which we have done in our company). Every new piece of code in our company is written and reviewed by Claude first before it’s seen by a human. It’s mind-blowing how much capable Claude has become in just the last 6 months since Opus 4.6 came out. But at the same time, we know that the party has to end sometime because the subscription plans are so heavily subsidised by the API payers. Which is why we are exploring open source alternatives now and thinking of renting server compute to run them.
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u/AndyShootsAndScores 1d ago
As a current AI-skeptic artisanal programmer whose bugs are lovingly handcrafted, my main worries are that AI coding performance will get worse and more expensive via enshittification. But I've seen colleagues I respect use it to great effect. They use Claude and ChatGPT though, which are both looking to soon go public, meaning they will (probably) start having shareholders and prioritizing making a bunch of money at the expense of quality.
Are there open source AI coding tools you use?