GoKawiilProgramming used to be free
April 13, 2026
The appearance of Mythos – a private LLM allegedly capable of finding a multitude of 0-days – has made people concerned about being denied powerful tools. This seems to be a turning point in the mainstream discourse, and it motivated me to complete the think piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while.
I have a related, intimate worry regarding LLMs. Just so that we’re clear, it’s not a common critique from the anti-AI crowd, like ethics or quality. While I share some reservations, frankly it’s not what gives me the most angst. My intent is to make this post thought-provoking even if your beliefs on this topic entirely differ from mine.
Backstory
I’m going to start a little personal.
I started programming as a child in the beginning of 2010s, thanks to my dad. He didn’t work as a software developer, so he insisted on using the technology he used and understood: QBasic. It’s an MS-DOS IDE for BASIC back from 35 years ago, and it was what you’d expect from such old software: a slow interpreter, 80x25 text mode output, 16 (!) colors in graphical mode, and a white-on-blue-background editor.
I didn’t run it on a Windows 7 laptop via NTVDM or DOSBox – common emulators of that time. No, it was an actual epoch-appropriate PC. I don’t have photos of my own, but here’s a stock picture just to get the feel across:
I didn’t know English much at the time, and there wasn’t built-in documentation regardless, so I had to learn by trial and error. Redo from start still haunts me.
I’m not telling you this to brag or beg for sympathy – I’m giving context for why I feel comfortable talking about the history of computing despite my young age and naivety. Even though I didn’t live through it, I heard tales, and I often find myself researching retrocomputing despite having modernized my stack.
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