AI讓個人程式開發再次變得昂貴

For the last twenty years, we've lived in a "golden age" of hobbyist coding.
If you had a laptop and an internet connection, you had access to the same
world-class tooling as a developer at Google or Microsoft.

But the pendulum is starting to swing back.

The golden age of free tooling

If you wanted to be a hobbyist coder in the 80s or early 90s, you didn't just
need a computer, you needed a budget. High-quality compilers could cost
hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. Professional IDEs were a corporate
luxury. At my first developer job I got a MSDN license which included Visual
Studio, which was great at the time!

And let's be realistic, if you couldn't or wouldn't pay, you could always turn
to warez and do a bit of piracy.

Then, the Open Source movement and the "Freeware" era changed everything. GCC
became a standard. Microsoft followed the trend by giving away Visual Studio
Community and VS Code. All new languages had free and open compilers. With a
few exceptions (like building for the Apple App Store), the barrier to entry
has been effectively zero for hobbyists.

The only thing you needed to "pay" was your time.

The AI tax

Enter LLMs. AI has fundamentally changed how I and many others build software.
The hype might not live up to reality, but it's still a massive change coming.
For debugging, "boring" tasks, to give you a discussion partner. And coding of
course. I vibe coded
"MAJORITY Dev Wrapped 2025"
just before X-Mas, in a (very late) evening as just one example.

But there's a catch - the "SOTA" (State of the Art) models aren't free.

There are open-source models you can run locally, or models that you can use
for free. But the gap between a "good" local model or a free model and the
latest flagship models you get access to with the top subscription to Claude
is massive. To get the best results, you need a subscription. You need an API
key. You need a credit card.

We are moving back to a world where your "tooling" is a subscription.

The privilege gap

I'm in a lucky position. I have access to the latest models through my work,
and even if I didn't, I could afford a subscription for one of them.

But for a teenager, a student, or someone just trying to break into tech, that
$20/month for a Claude Pro subscription can be a real issue. And what's more,
compared to the older times when you paid for Visual Studio the "standard"
$20/month AI subscription doesn't even come with unlimited use!

When the best "coding partner" in the world is behind a paywall, the playing
field is no longer level. We are seeing the emergence of a two-tier hobbyist
ecosystem:

And this gap doesn't just affect what people build, it affects what they feel
confident contributing to.

What happens to Open Source?

Ironically, AI might actually increase total OSS contributions. I've
personally submitted PRs I never would have attempted before - the AI helped
me understand unfamiliar codebases in minutes instead of hours.

But the source of contributions may shift. For companies, AI is absurdly cheap
compared to developer salaries. For a teenager, $20/month or more is a
different calculation entirely.

Open source won't die. But we might see it become more corporate-backed and
less "garage coder" driven.

Closing thoughts

I don't think hobby coding is dying, but the "free" part of it is becoming an
illusion. We are returning to a time where the quality of your tools is once
again tied to the size of your wallet. I think that is a real shame.

And this time around you can't even "cheat" by being a pirate!

Unfortunately, even if the LLM providers wanted to, I suspect they can't give
away their SOTA models for free. A colleague of mine once used $300 of
LLM in a single day. Anthropic themselves
writes that a developer
using Claude Code spends $6/day in average. Times 30 that is
$180/month! The worst part? It's not even clear if the current prices
are sustainable given the massive amount of compute needed!