I don't think it's going to work out the way everybody thinks it will. The current narrative, at least the one pushed by the companies selling the shovels, is that AI will become centralized. Anthropic and OpenAI will offer safe, vetted AI. Developers will become mere prompt-engineers, submitting requests to these benevolent gatekeepers. They have tamed the dragon. We will benefit only if we become tenants to their API-driven fiefdoms, paying by the token for the privilege of renting intelligence.
“They didn’t care that they’d seen it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory” - Clay Shirky
I complain about AI frequently on this blog, but not because I don’t think it is useful. I use it quite frequently on my day to day. But what I hate is hype and fake narratives. In fact, I believe that the opposite of their narrative will come true.
Technology will continue to improve whether Moore’s Law becomes a relic of the past or not. It’s been called dead, yet CPUs and GPUs are becoming faster than ever. I do not believe for one second that developers with pre-LLM experience will end up on the losing side.
And if technology continues to improve, then we won’t need OpenAI or Antropic in the future. We will be able to load large open models right into our powerful personal computers with more than acceptable inference speeds. Unless you believe that computers have reached their zeniths and it is all stagnation going forward.
The gap between frontier models and open-source alternatives is already all about specialty, and it will continue to narrow. And when developers ubiquitously have access to local models, they will have access to everything.
Right now, companies are hoping that developers will use their AI and remain within their ecosystems. They're building guardrails, imposing limits, and designing their models to serve corporate interests first. They see developers as customers, not as threats to their business model. But I’ve seen how easy it is to switch from one frontier model to the next. In fact, some developers in my team accidentally switched by selecting the “auto” mode on their IDE. They didn’t realise that every subsequent request was from a different model.
It’s the developer who will end up benefiting from this far more than the corporations will.
One developer recently spent his evenings using an AI agent to reverse engineer every peripheral within arm's reach.
From those devices, I’ve come away with a full plaintext command shell inside my microphone, a webcam whose activity LED I can switch off while it records, and a key light that hands out memory writes to anyone on the WiFi.
He documented the entire process, implemented his own firmware update utilities, and completely enumerated the functionality of devices that were never designed to be user-serviceable. AI gave him the ability to fully control hardware that he has paid for in his own terms.
Another developer created OpenLogi, a local-first alternative to Logitech’s software used to remap your own mouse button. The manufacturer was forcing users to create an online account to have access to the hardware they had paid for. OpenLogi gives full control back to the user.
This is what happens when developers have the tools and the motivation to bypass corporate control. And AI is about to make this kind of reverse engineering and alternative-building dramatically more accessible.
At the speed of large language models, an activist could create a brand new rotating messaging platform every week to avoid the prying eyes of an oppressive government. Someone else can review his own model and add some self improving features. In fact, you could explore new AI paradigms.
Most developers I know have a side project they don't have time to work on. With AI, they will have the ability to execute on those ideas. These days, I'm able to run Deepseek on my own $400 local machine at a much slower speed, but I'm not in a hurry. Give it a couple years, I could run something even more powerful.
I don't need a project management tool where I have to pay monthly. My actual needs are much simpler. For example, I actually like Jira, despite how much I complain about it on this blog. But I don't need to have Jira for myself on my personal projects. I can build a tool that works solely for my needs.
I can easily build applications in environments I am not too familiar with but that are more appropriate for the task. I can build prototypes in a couple hours now and throw them away if they don't match my initial expectation. I can do so much more.
Dario Amodei and others are trying to scare us with the capability of AI. They sell the fear of superintelligent systems that will render human developers obsolete or dependent. But this is not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is we will not need Anthropic anymore. Yes, they will have the high-end hardware. But we don't need high-end hardware the same way most people did not need a professional camera. All they needed was a crappy camera with a good filter to post on Instagram.
Flickr was superior to Instagram, but the superior technology lost to the one that was "good enough" and in everyone's hands.
The funny thing in all this is that by making everything AI-dependent, by building their moats and their guardrails and their API toll booths, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are selling foot guns. They are building the dark fibers of our era, the infrastructure that developers will eventually subvert, repurpose or simply bypass. Because eventually, we won’t ask for permission. We can just do whatever we want with tools freely available to anyone.
We own our devices. We own our data. And soon, we'll own the intelligence on our own terms, without a subscription fee and without a corporate overlord. At the very least, we will get free GPUs.