I don't think the "producers" argument is true, and even so it really does depend on the profession and on current trends.

What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.

Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.

So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.

> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods

This is why people who work critical jobs never go hungry.

> The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking

It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects.

I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

> Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.

Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.

> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.

It's alright. Those who would like to monetize can. There are others who wouldn't and UBI would utilize that surplus talent, which otherwise had to perform tasks they weren't skilled at to earn a living.

> most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.

With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want. And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.

I really view UBI as something that puts oil in the society: people have less friction to be at the spot they're better at. People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore. And jobs that nobody wants to do would finally be paid by how much they suck instead of how much money your parents had to educate you.

> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question

I don't really see the issue. We're far from having shortage of ways to make people pay: ads, paywall, soft paywall, begging, rate limits. What's the issue with those? I certainly don't like them as a user and as a member of society but am fine with people doing that.

Especially with UBI in place: if the dev is putting a paywall, they have to compete with people that have plausibly much more freedom of time and mind to allocate to another free foss project. So in the end it becomes less profitable to be adversarial against end users.

Every company and their dog is saying that LLMs/"AI" is supposed to be that magic fairy anytime now.