And yet the systems built at these places far exceed what an indie dev can do

> (...) but most of what they pay you for is dealing with internal (arguably mostly social) stuff.

Not really. They pay you to deliver something, but you also need to coordinate and interact with people. That involves coordinating and syncing.

There is absolutely no position or role whatsoever, either in a big corporation or small freelancer gig, that you do not need to coordinate and interact with people.

Pray tell, how do you expect to be paid while neither delivering results nor coordinating with anyone else?

If you assume that AI will further enshittify the corporate software program writ large, it’s no easy to see how this is analogous to the dot com boom where new good ideas get sidelined and easy ones get mainlined, and the outsiders ultimately storm the castle and win. Granted, I don’t really think that is the case, but it’s a possibility

Cheap-as-chips AI from gigantic data-centres is certain to go away, one way or another. Either the companies succeed in their game plan, and start to raise prices once they've established a set of dependent customers, or else they all go bust and the data-centres stand idle whilst the industry puzzles over a business model that works.

Of course the technology will remain. You'll still be able to run models locally (but they won't be as good). And eventually someone will work out how to make the data-centres turn a profit (but that won't be cheap for users).

Or maybe the local models will get good enough, and the data-centres will turn out to be a gigantic white elephant.

I was not clear, apologies, I meant to say, I feel the corporate control over things should go away.

AI is definitely not going away. But I feel it could be like how it was in 90s, when people can get their hands on a computer and do amazing things. Yes, I know corporate existed then, but I think it was not this direct, and sinister as it is now.

Many of the corporates that are trying to getting rid of employees in favor of AI, So they might lose a huge ground to someone who keeps the old school way going while leveraging AI in a more practical way, and general people will soon realize it's not what they're being fed, and revert, but it's not that easy for the big ones to rollback.

Which might end the corporate control over many of the things.

This is what I meant, but I am sleepy and tired, failed to articulate properly, hopefully the gist of it was clear.