First off, Framework is maybe the most exciting company I've seen over the last 5 years. My Framework 13 AMD is a wonderful machine. Thank you to your and your team for the incredible work and commitment!
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
That's actually the part that I was getting confused by. Does everything with a yellow caution sign have to be upgraded together, or can that happen over time?
Reading it again, I'm assuming they're overtime and individual upgrades that can take place? If someone could confirm or deny that for me, I would appreciate it. I may just be overthinking this table.
Edit: yeah that's what I'm taking away after rereading this a few more times. Very impressed by the modularity on each of those parts.
I never used a Mac for my personal machine, but I've always used them as my work machines. I purchased the first generation of the Framework 13 AMD laptops And it's been my personal machine ever since. It's a damn fine machine and I love having full control over the components in my machine without some OEM nonsense for repairs that manufacturers like Dell try to pull (wouldn't accept non-OEM batteries for me in the past).
The battery life is the biggest negative compared to a MacBook, but that seems to be better now (though I doubt it, or anyone, can compete with the power/performance that Apple is putting out now).
The issue with my advice to you though is that I prefer Linux. And I would be running Linux at work if I could. Mac OS is fine, but I do prefer Linux as my main operating system.
If I didn't specifically want to run Linux, though, I would probably be using a MacBook, despite their lack of repairability.
All that said, I really love my framework and I don't intend on buying another machine any time soon, especially because I can upgrade my Framework 5 years from now (hopefully).
With them comparing to Opus 4.5, I find it hard to take some of these in good faith. Opus 4.7 is new, so I don't expect that, but Opus 4.6 has been out for quite some time.
The thing is, Opus 4.5 is where the model reached Good Enough, at least for a wide variety of problems I use LLMs for. Before that, I almost never thought it was a more productive use of my time to use AI for development tasks, because it would always hallucinate something that would waste a bunch of my time. It just wasn't a good trade.
But, if for some reason everything stopped at Opus 4.5 level and we never got a better model (and 4.6/4.7 are better, if only marginally so and mostly expanding the kind of work it can do rather than making it better at making web apps), we could still do a lot of real work real fast with Opus 4.5, and software development would never go back to everyone handwriting most of the code.
A model as good as Opus 4.5 (or slightly better according to the mostly easily gamed benchmarks) at a 10th the price is probably a worthwhile proposition for a lot of people. $100 a month, or more, to get Opus 4.7 is well worth it for a western developer...the time the lower-end models waste is far more expensive than the cost of using the most expensive models. For the foreseeable future, I'll keep paying a premium for the models that waste less of my time and produce better results with less prodding.
But, also, it's wild how fast things move. Open models you can run on relatively modest hardware are competitive with frontier models of two years ago. I mean, you can run Qwen 3.6 MoE 35B A3B or the larger Gemma 4 models on normal hardware, like a beefy Macbook or a Strix Halo or any recentish 24GB/32GB GPU...not much more expensive than the average developer laptop of pre-AI times. And, it can write code. It can write decent prose (Qwen is maybe better at code, Gemma definitely has better prose), they can use tools, they have a big enough context window for real work. They aren't as good as Opus 4.5, yet.
Anyway, I use several models at this point, for security and code reviews, even if Claude Code with Opus is still obviously the best option for most software development tasks. I'll give Qwen a try, too. I like their small models, which punch well above their weight, I'll probably like the big one, too.
If money is no object, then nothing else is worth considering if it isn't Codex 5.4/Opus 4.7/SOTA. But for many to most people, value Vs. relative quality are huge levers.
Even many people on a Claude subscription aren't choosing or able to choose Opus 4.7 because of those cost/usage pressures. Often using Sonnet or an older opus, because of the value Vs. quality curve.
Unfortunately, like with the release of Qwen3.6-Plus, this model also isn’t released for local use. From the linked article: “Qwen3.6-Max-Preview is the hosted proprietary model available via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio”
Cost may or may not be a factor in my choice of model, but knowing the capabilities and knowing they will remain consistent, reliable, and available over time is always a dominant consideration. Lately, Anthropic in particular has not been great at that.
anecdotally the quality of output isn't significantly different, the speed seems to be what you're really paying for, and since the alternative is free I'll stick to local.
When Sonnet 4.6 was released, I switchmed my default from Opus to Sonnet because it was about en par with Opus 4.5. While 4.6 and 4.7 are "better", the leap is too small for most tasks for me to need it, and so reducing cost is now a valid reason to stay at that level.
If even cheaper models start reaching that level (GLM 5.1 is also close enough that I'm using it at lot), that's a big deal, and a totally valid reason to compare against Opus 4.5
An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.
What do you think would have been more valuable for him to do? His sci-fi books had a huge impact, and not only on sci-fi and literature, they literally changed people's lives. People decided to pursue a career in science or technology because they read these books when they were kids.
> He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.
Indeed after becoming a giant of the field in the 1940s and 1950s, when he wrote most of the novels and short stories we know him for (Robots, Foundation and Empire) he took a long hiatus. In the 1960s and 70s, as far as I can tell, his meager sci-fi output consisted of some short stories, a couple of novelizations of sci-fi movies, and a standalone novel (The Gods Themselves).
After Sputnik he focused on science writing, believing that to be more widely useful.
He only returned to writing more Foundation, Robots, and Empire novels in the 1980s.
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
> In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research.
I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you can't get fired.
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
I've read his biography. It was definitely intentional - and of course making a living by writing was a big factor. But he just didn't like the academic environment or his colleagues.
Like, all together? I'd agree that copyright terms are often much too long, but if you write a book, I'm totally okay with you owning the rights to that and making money off of it for a while.
We need to split "a creation" and "a set of ideas used in creation"
You created entire book ? Sell it for 40 years, sure
But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe.
This sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it:
"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.
Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.
Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?
Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
>"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Yep
Theres no scarcity to manage here and its more comical the further I look at it.
>Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down
Well it may have done with LLMs we arent 100% sure there yet.
>Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
You cant copy an experience, people will always pack out stadiums for live music. If musicians wont make music because oops it got added to the gestalt cultural heritage of mankind well they can jump in a lake. And I have talked with tons of authors who have full time jobs on the side. This will only really impact the top 5% or so of professional authors, and force them to be more productive too.
>The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Being the first person who can manufacture something still gives you a decent first mover advantage. It doesn't mean you cant sell your goods at a profit, it just means you have to sell your goods with competition. So less profit. Likewise with Music and Fiction, lots of people want to be first, your first book will sell a lot of copies, the first pressing of your vinyl also.
Honestly it probably means more public sector RND funding is required and not much else.
Why not? I'd imagine that you could grant specific permissions upon MCP auth. Is the issue that the services you're using don't support those controls, or is it something else?
I haven’t seen a single major MCP provider that would let us limit access properly
Miro, Linear, Notion etc… They just casually let the MCP do anything the user can and access everything.
For example: Legal is never letting us connect to Notion MCP as is because it has stuff that must NEVER reach any LLM even if they pinky swear not to train with our stuff.
-> thus, hard deterministic limits are non-negotiable.
it's straightforward to spin up a custom MCP wrapper around any API with whatever access controls you want
the only time i reach for official MCP is when they offer features that are not available via API - and this annoys me to no end (looking at you Figma, Hex)
Indeed, ever since MCPs came out, I would always either wrap or simply write my own.
I needed to access Github CI logs. I needed to write Jira stories. I didn't even bother glancing at any of the several existing MCP servers for either one of them - official or otherwise. It was trivial to vibe code an MCP server with precisely the features I need, with the appropriate controls.
Using and auditing an existing 3rd party MCP server would have been more work.
“Communism can work we just did not see a good implementation of it”. If majority of implementations fail at it -> protocol is defined incorrectly. With security first approach it would not be the case.
Blocking, lowering, raising, and pinning domains has been one of my favorite Kagi features. Some of my block highlights include pintrest (and all it's other TLDs) and any AI trash articles I find when looking up something programming related. I lower Quora and Medium. I raise good references like docs sites, Wikipedia, ArchWiki, etc.
Not only are the stock results better: I also get more control over what I see and how it's presented. Huge fan.
I probably have rose colored glasses, but this is what I associate with Hacker News when I first started coming to this site. Truly absurd projects for no reason other than the love of the game and detailed write ups.
I'm not an LLM post hater, but it definitely has been a bit draining lately. This is exactly what I love to see here.
yeah - I wish the 'Hacker' part of 'HackerNews' got more attention. Last few years it often feels more like "VC-Buzzword-of-the-day-News" - AI is just the most recent cycle.
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
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