What will happen when AI companies increase the price of tokens?

The code produced will only be understandable by AI. You could use locally hosted LLMs, but it won't be as performant as AI run by big guys. And there is nothing stopping greedy companies implementing some ridiculous pattern that only their model can reasonably work with.

So what you'll do in situation when you can't understand "your" codebase and you have to make changes or fix a bug?

What happens when the price of tokens goes to 0?

The open weight models are nipping on the heels of frontier models. The frontier labs have to make forward progress and keep tokens cheap in order to maintain marketshare.

Eventually, we'll have a Mythos-level model running on integrated hardware on every PC.