AI Made Hobby Coding Expensive Again

The free tools are still free. If coding is the hobby, why would someone want to delegate their hobby to an agent? Is the goal of a hobby the journey or the destination?

A good question! Both I would say. There's a reason people pirated Photoshop.

Not everyone will want to automate the coding of course. But if I'm dreaming of becoming a game dev and like writing games in the evenings after class, I for sure want the best tools I can find. If I'm working as a shop assistant, but are intertested in coding and dream of a dev job, then it will help if I can use the same tools as professionals use. If I want to contribute to open source, but all easy beginner tasks are automated away, or are 10x as difficult without an AI, then maybe I will give up. If my friend writes a Minecraft mod supported by AI, but I can't, then I might never become interested in coding in the first place.

And so on, there are many ways this can play out.

Nobody's forcing anybody to use LLMs for hobby projects. You don't have to take on the expense if you don't want to.

Completely unhinged.