[tbrownaw]

The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have.

(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)

[tkel]

If software development were democratized, then decisions that software developers make would be made democratically. On or off the job. On the job, the workplace would be run democratically, instead of as it is now, dictatorially. Or off the job, groups of engineers would be coming together to create governance and make collective decisions about the software they use, like the Debian project or the recent Nix governance. Neither is the case.

Building yourself a table using some new carbon fiber hammer isn't democracy. That's just consumerism.

[nextaccountic]

Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services.

The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the opposite of democracy

[Wobbles42]

This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.

Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.