> Programming used to be (and still is, to a large extent) an activity that can be done with open and free tools. I am afraid that in a few years, that will no longer be possible .. The excuse "but you earn six figures, what' $200/month to you?" doesn't really capture the issue here.
Yeah, coding (and to a lesser extent IT in general) at one point was a real meritocracy, where skill mattered more than expensive/unnecessary academic pedigree. Not perfect of course, but real nevertheless. And coders were the first engineers who really said "I won't be renting a suit for an interview, I think an old t-shirt is fine" and we normalized that. Part of this was just uncompromisingly practical.. like you can either do the work or not, and fuck the rest of that noise. But there was also a pretty punk aspect to this for many people in the industry.. some recognition that needing to have money to make money was a bullshit relic of closeted classism.
But we're fast approaching a time where both the old metrics (how much quality code are you writing how fast and what's your personal open source portfolio like?) and the new metrics (are you writing a blog post every week about your experience with the new models, is your personal computer fast enough to even try to run crappy local models?) are both going to favor those with plenty of money to experiment.
It's not hard to see how this will make inequality worse and disadvantage junior devs, or just talented people that didn't plan other life-events around purchasing API credits/GPUs. A pay-to-play kind of world was ugly enough in politics and business so it sucks a lot to see it creeping into engineering disciplines but it seems inevitable. If paying for tokens/GPU ever allows you to purchase work or promotion by proxy, we're right back to this type of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...