Do you mind sharing what industry you’re in where you can fully rely on FOSS? In my industry we’re dependent on MATLAB, Xilinx tools, closed source embedded software and more. To name a few industries: game devs might be stuck with unity, finance quant devs might be stuck with Bloomberg terminals, iOS app devs are stuck with apple’s tooling etc… this isn’t just an LLM problem IMO.

I think this is different. Yes, 3rd party tools and services are nothing new. Depending on 3rd party libraries is also a standard thing, although minimum dependency is generally considered a good practice. But all these services provide something you don't want to do yourself and are willing to pay. They all complement what you do, and don't replace your core competency.

Apple is your business partner, doing marketing and distribution for you, and shares its user base. Bloomberg terminals provide real time data and UI to non-technical finance people. Github provides you Git hosting service so you don't need to setup and maintain servers. MATLAB (although there are Octave, Python and open alternatives) sells numerical computation environment to non-CS engineers. Xilinx is sells its hardware and dev tools. Game devs use Unity because they want to focus on gameplay and not game engine development.

These are all the examples of Division of Labor. This time, however, you have to pay for your core competency, because you cannot compete with a good AI coder in the long run. The value you provide diminishes to almost nothing. Yes you can write prompts, but anyone, even a mediocre LLM can write prompts these days. If you need some software, you don't need to hire SW engineers anymore. A handful of vendors dominate the SW development market. Yes, you can switch. But only between the 3 or 4 tech giants. It's an Oligopoly.

If we have FOSS alternatives, at least we can build new services around them and can move on to this new era. We can adapt. Otherwise, we become a human frontend between the client and the AI giants.

That's a good remark. As my sibling said, backend and web dev.

But indeed it always struck me that some developpers decided to become Apple developpers and sacrifice 30% of everything they ever produce to Apple.

I would argue that it might a bit different though, because when doing iOS development it's possible that you don't lose you core skill, which is building software, and that you can switch to another platform with relative ease. What I think might happen with LLM is that people will lose the core skill (maybe not for the generation who did do LLM-less development, but some devs might eventually not ever know other ways to work, and will become digital vassals of whatever service managed to kill all others)

backend web services devops frontend javascript

just three possible examples