I am not a programmer or software engineer by any means, but I use AI as a high powered assistant who needs robust oversight. Helping me craft FOIA requests and processing datasets returned to continue digging and researching, reverse engineering, de compiling, etc. It is, in my use cases, a moat killer (ability to avoid moats of non open source software) or multi tool/"swiss army knife".

To your point, corps are constantly chasing more dollars and TAM, whereas I can build what I need for me, I control it, and I can freely share the output with others for them to build off of.

https://craigmod.com/essays/robot_blood/ speaks more eloquently on this than me.