>You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

In abstract, probably true, but so vague to be useless.

I can probably vibe code with qwen on debian. But are you then going to pivot from your microsoft example to like, my ISP? And if I point out I can move to an ISP with less than 5 staff, you will probably just move the goalposts further right?

Might be better to let you establish your goalposts first hey.

What has your experience vibecoding with Qwen on Debian been like so far? What tooling and approaches have you found to work best?

I'm implementing an MCP client using Qwen3 4B and its tool call capabilities are impressive! I'm sure it will only improve and the 30B is probably already much better.

What are you running it in, ollama? Did you have to install some additional software to enable it to call tools (also via MCP?)

LM Studio. No additional software but I implemented the MCP client myself using the typescript-sdk[0]

0. https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk

Thank you very much!

I use it on Windows, I am just loosely aware that I could run it on debian if I wished. I use 7b and its roughly as useful as GPT 3.5. I dont have any tools linked to it yet.

Does that mean "pretty useful" or "a total waste of time"? I never got much useful code out of GPT 3.5.

3.5 was all about context window management. The second you hit that wall it became useless. I would either chunk the problem into smaller pieces or rollover my context every hour or so and it worked a treat.

The second it started dropping context it was hilariously unreliable. It would just, rewrite the entire function or drop elements we hadnt discussed for a while.

I see, thanks!

Eh, this I cannot abide with. There are dozens of hosted model providers, from the foundational providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) to cloud re-hosting (Azure, GCP, AWS) to routing proxies (OpenRouter, Vercel, etc). There are huge open source models that are quite competitive (Qwen3-Coder). There are smaller open source models that can run on your laptop and easily help with function writing. There are walled garden, highly integrated tools (Claude Code, Codex) and there are plug-and-play bring your own API key or model tools (Charm Crush, etc). The ecosystem is vast, and every facet of it appears to be getting better.

What if you just like do normal programming instead?

What if vibe coding becomes 20x faster than normal coding? Are you going to stay old school and write artisanal code?

It may surprise you to learn that some people actually like programming, so yes I will. If AI tools are 20x faster then I guess I'll have to use them to get paid, but I'll be damned if I start letting a computer do the fun part for me on personal projects.

That said I'm not too worried. Vibe coding is currently slower due to how bad it is at writing software. In several years companies pouring billions into improving LLMs still haven't been able to make them not suck. That suggests to me that it's a fundamental limitation of the tech at present, and won't get better until another research breakthrough happens.

We've had AI assisted coding for less than half a decade.

The rapidity of development is astonishing.

These two statements can coexist. Yes, AI is amazing. And yes, it is not good enough yet to significantly speed up my work beyond research and writing tests.

Quantity was never an issue, quality is.

Universal statements have a high burden of proof.

People used to claim we'd never fly. Shortly after we started, we reached the moon.

The entirety of the last 60 years of software may have been a low energy local optima.

The last 60 years of software gave us amazing projects, and if you go through their code, you'll see the same principles that is outlined in every good software engineering book: Good organization, hackish when needs be to resolve some accidental complexity, good comments,...

Most of those things rely on having the right mindset/philosophy first, then having a good grasp about the domain and the technologies (programming languages, platforms, libraries,...). After that you need to start thinking about the tools you used to help you (editors, test runners, static analyzers, debuggers,...). Most LLM users put the latter above all others. Like using the agent precludes knowing about the domain, the technology, and the tooling. And what philosophy? Craftmanship? Sir, here it's all about YOLO.

> You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

True, but that's also not exactly a good thing to be doing to begin with.

This is one of my biggest problems with AI coding assistance. And how they will shape the development of less human friendly APIs and libraries over time.

> If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.

Why wouldn't you just get another account?

Age verification laws in the US are chipping away at Internet anonymity. You might not be able to get another account because your legal identity might be required (and can be banned).

This isn’t just a US thing. Many countries require KYC for a lot of online accounts

All major platforms have mechanisms to identify ban evasion. It's not so easy to create another account when, for example, they ask for a phone number.

Slightly unrelated but GH's ToS clearly only permit one free account per person and I've heard they sometimes enforce this

In the U.S. at least, it is trivial to buy a new SIM anonymously. But really, you should refuse to use any platform that requires a phone number in the first place. These companies make it implicitly very clear that they want to control you and extract every bit of information that they can from you.

i'm guessing you've never seen r/LocalLLaMA?

It's a miracle that open-weight LLMs are even a thing at all, let alone as good as they are (very).

You need thousands of dollars of hardware to run a decent coding model with bearable tokens/s.

Freedom isn't free. That is why GPL does allow charging money for software.

Can't tell if this is a joke or not...