It's cool, and it's nice to see people rebelling against the "hardware I bought held hostage to a subscription" business model, but if you use an AI to do this and don't understand what it's done, you've just traded one subscription dependency for another.

Have you, though?

Will this stop operating if you unsubscribe from claude?

Will add-on work from chatgpt or Kimi or Qwen require starting from scratch?

Obviously, the answer is 'no'. So regardless of the "do you understand the code" purity test, this is still a net good, both for this customer, and others who can make use of this work.

I know people get a bit salty about outsiders coming in and showing stuff they 'built', and it does feel a bit like they shouldn't get the praise for something they basically spent a few evenings prompting into existence, but I think the better way of looking at is this: They had a need, they solved it, they shared it. Hopefully this helps other people as well.

I can understand the feeling of 'this isn't fair' if you're a lone third party developer who spent months of work developing an alternative that you sell for $30 a seat to a market of maybe 10000 people. Still, though. Plenty of occupations have gone through the same thing. Seamstress, farrier, lamp lighter, travel agent. I don't think the solution is trying to make occupations into gate-kept guilds.

What are you talking about. This software is like the old paid-once Photoshop. Once you have it, _it's yours_. I find that so incredibly liberating, I'm finally making software that I own at the end.