Programming used to be free

Mythos and the new gatekeepers

It has been reported that the appearance of Mythos — a private LLM allegedly capable of finding a multitude of 0-days — has jolted parts of the tech community. The story surfaced in a think piece on the Purple Syringa blog, shared on Lobsters, and it reads like a wake-up call: are powerful coding tools about to be rolled behind paywalls and NDAs? The author says this moment changed the mainstream discourse and pushed them to finish a long‑standing reflection on how we learned to code.

A childhood learned on scraps and goodwill

The piece reads like a love letter to cheap hardware and free documentation. The writer recalls learning on a QBasic MS‑DOS box and later a Pentium II running Windows XP, teaching themselves PHP from a stray book, then leaning on php.net, PVS‑Studio blog posts and sites like htmlbook.ru and Khan Academy. It’s a reminder that whole careers started with trial and error, dusty forums and the generosity of volunteers — compilers, tutorials and tooling made available for free or at negligible cost. The emotional core is plain: gratitude for what the commons once offered and a little grief that it might not be the same for the next generation.

Why it matters beyond nostalgia

This isn’t mere nostalgia. The essay points out a hard truth: once, professional compilers and UNIX sources cost thousands of dollars, affordable only to big institutions — Watcom C/C++ and AT&T UNIX get name‑checked — and hobbyists were largely shut out. Fast forward and open ecosystems made programming approachable; now, if key capabilities live solely in private LLMs or gated services, access could narrow again. The piece doesn’t call for techno‑purgery. Instead it asks a blunt question: how do we keep essential tooling public and usable? It’s a challenge for engineers, platforms and policy-makers alike — and the conversation has only just begun.

Sources: purplesyringa.moe, Lobsters