"hard cap it's technically impossible" is really funny because every other provider manages it just fine. Even wrappers like OpenRouter enable you to set a hard cap on proxied Google resources, but Google themselves are unable to manage that inside gcloud.
Besides the reasons already listed, Cloudflare is free, Azure is not. As a pirate site owner I imagine you don't want you payment information with your name associated with your pirate site. You can pay for hosting and dns with crypto.
So many people in this thread started commenting before trying the product or even watching a simple video of what it does. It's like reddit, commenting based on title without any actual comprehension of the content. Shameful really.
According to the github readme the author has had the idea in mind since 2015. Perhaps you ought to be a little less dismissive based on, what I assume your issue is, the writing style.
True, but this is not only a trade-off between opex and capex.
Local inference using open weight models provides guaranteed performance which will remain stable over time, and be available at any moment.
As many current HN threads show, depending on external AI inference providers is extremely risky, as their performance can be degraded unpredictably at any time or their prices can be raised at any time, equally unpredictably.
Being dependent on a subscription for your programming workflow is a huge bet, that you will gain more from a slightly higher quality of the proprietary models than you will lose if the service will be degraded in the future.
As the recent history has shown, many have already lost this bet.
I am not a gambler, so I have made my choice, which is local AI inference, using a variety of models depending on the task, i.e. both small models completely executable on relatively cheap GPUs (like the new Intel GPUs), medium models that need e.g. 128 GB on a CPU, and huge models that must be stored on fast SSDs (e.g. interleaved on multiple PCIe 5.0 SSDs).
Such a strategy is achievable with a modest capex, in the lower half of the 4-digit range.
I agree in principle that more democratic compute = better and third parties introduce additional risk that is outside of your control. That said I just don't see it working economically - either you have an underpowered GPU (4-digit range) at which point you have weak model, or slow model, probably both weak and slow. Or you have expensive GPU cluster, but at that point you also need to consider utilization as you are probably not streaming tokens out 24/7 and at that point TCO is just drastically more expensive for self hosting.
Personally I hope we see a third way - strong open weight models hosted by variety of companies actually competing on price and 9s of availability. That way capex expensive GPUs are fully utilized and users can rent intelligence as a commodity.
There is a very apt analogy to virtual server hosting - hosting vps/shared web is a commodity, it does not make financial sense for most users to host their website on their own physical servers in their basements.
Well it's not like AI investment money is coming out of thin air - ultimately normies are buying stuff that AI enhanced companies produce which allows those companies to feed this money to the actual winners/1% that truly benefits. I don't think that it's fair to say that AI has been only negative to the normies, when they need to be the ones willingly feeding the beast with their money for the whole thing to perpetuate.
That said I obviously also see a bunch of negative consequences, and perhaps agree that the negatives outweigh the positives.
Most discussion of using code generation on gamedev forums is taboo. As in, do what you want in the privacy of your own home, but in public, try to have some self-respect as an artist.
I've seen some "devs" livestreaming themselves coding a game using LLMs, and it's not pretty. But that's my opinion of vibecoding in general — it's the tool one uses when they don't want to think too much, which is the furthest path to greatness.
Some random examples off reddit (try to compare the sentiment if it had been posted on Hacker News):
In general, interest in AI-assisted coding is associated with people that have no experience whatsoever and just want to make a game out of thin air without putting in the effort.
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