I am not that concerned about AI writing all the code, because it was never just coding that I fell in love with, it was development. I started programming to bring my ideas to life. Writing code was just the medium, the real joy was turning my thoughts into reality.
Whenever I express concern about the current state of AI, people often ask "If you can develop things so much faster now, what's the problem?"
The problem was accessibility.
When I started, all you needed to build something meaningful was a computer, even the cheapest one available. Documentation was free, tools were free, and the main currency required was time and effort. Putting in that personal effort to complete a project made the final product feel genuinely special.
Compare that to today. Development is increasingly shifting from effort-driven to budget-driven. The developers who can afford top-tier AI models are significantly more productive than those who cannot. In developing countries, expecting a student to pay $20 a month for an AI subscription is completely unrealistic. When you pour weeks of effort into building a project, only to watch someone with a higher budget one-shot a similar application using an AI agent, the work loses its magic.
Software quality is increasingly becoming dependent on how many tokens you can afford to burn. Myself being a student in a developing country, I feel left behind watching people who aren’t even software developers build really cool stuff using AI, much better than what I had spent months making. Beyond software, I also liked to build all sorts of things. But none of them had the kind of accessibility software had. I really miss when having a simple computer, some free time, and enough motivation was all it took to create something truly amazing.
Top comments (2)
Try Qoder and look into the Chinese models. You can get the same work done for a fraction of the cost.
If you take idea-creation as a road, AI is a toll-gated highway... It makes it faster, but it by no means replaces the old road, it just gave you a different path to the destination. Nobody is stopping you from sitting with a coding book and writing your code by hand, but they also arent stopping you from using free-tier AI to do the job for you? People are placing their own opinionated gates on everything, which is just a way to gatekeep what is actually freely available. I got more done in Qoder with their Lite model in a day, than I did with Claude in a month... For free, vs $20 a month... If you gatekeep yourself, that's your own fault, OpenRouter, Cloudflare Workers AI, Qoder, Deepseek, Alibaba Cloud, GCP, Azure, all have freebies, trials, permanently free things you can use, you dont need a subscription and if you're fooling yourself into thinking you do, then whose fault is that? Not AI, definitely not the other people paying a fortune for it, it's you, you're narrowing your own vision, focusing on what's out of reach, instead of finding new roads. That's always been the case, why write a thing from scratch, when a quick google search gave you a package that does exactly what you need it to do, for free? Take adobe acrobat for OCR, expensive, gatekeeping... Vs 10 min writing a python script, with a freely available package and you get the same result... If you gatekeep yourself, you're just wearing blinders, take them off and view the world around you, nothing got more expensive, or gatekeeped, you're just looking in the wrong places.
Atleast that's my opinion, because I fell in that same trap... I even upgraded to a $100 a month subscription, because I thought there was no other way, now I'm back down to $20 and I dont even use it, because what's free is genuinely better 99% of the time. Why struggle with 5h windows, when the chinese models dont have any cap and are much cheaper and smarter? Qwen 3.8 Max and Kimi 3.0 are beyond the new Opus' intelligence and speed, yet cost a fraction of it? When I realized that, a whole new world opened up.
My suggestion, is download Qoder, give it a try and tell me if you still think that AI is limited to those who spend the most. Because it made me realize, I was just too narrow minded to realize I was gatekeeping myself.
Which, keep in mind, is consumerism. We're all rushing for AI, "it costs more, so it's better", "I need the latest model", etc. We've fallen into the trap that garnered Apple 2 Trillion dollar valuation. We're so scared of falling behind, that we pay a premium for something worse than what's offered cheaper outside of our eyesight.