Coding was already democratized. Anyone could already build their own tools and projects. Children were already learning to code in school and making things in Roblox. There were no gatekeepers other than time and effort.

Now no one will even bother to learn to code. They'll be tethered to these proprietary black boxes and services believing their ability to prompt Claude is some kind of liberation, even though they'll never understand or be able edit anything the AI creates for them, and they'll be limited by whatever the model can express, which will be determined by the companies that control the model. If you think that local models will be the answer - they won't be. If a model capable of competing with the big LLM services and creating professional level software/media/whatever at a whim existed, you wouldn't be allowed to own it. Certainly not for free and without condition.

That may be a useful thing for some people, but the widespread loss of knowledge, skill and freedom and the mass centralized control of all forms of intellectual expression in exchange for simply getting a MVP as fast as possible is going to be a net negative for humanity.

> Coding was already democratized.

This is funny to see, exact same argument that occurred when Stable Diffusion released, but engineers on HN didn't really care as long as it made pretty pictures. But now that AI comes for my industry? Oh the outrage! In reality it's just hypocrisy all around.