For the last twenty years, we've lived in a "golden age" of hobbyist coding. If you had a laptop and an internet connection, you had access to the same world-class tooling as a developer at Google or Microsoft.
But the pendulum is starting to swing back.
If you wanted to be a hobbyist coder in the 80s or early 90s, you didn't just need a computer, you needed a budget. High-quality compilers could cost hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. Professional IDEs were a corporate luxury. At my first developer job I got a MSDN license which included Visual Studio, which was great at the time!
And let's be realistic, if you couldn't or wouldn't pay, you could always turn to warez and do a bit of piracy.
Then, the Open Source movement and the "Freeware" era changed everything. GCC became a standard. Microsoft followed the trend by giving away Visual Studio Community and VS Code. All new languages had free and open compilers. With a few exceptions (like building for the Apple App Store), the barrier to entry has been effectively zero for hobbyists.
The only thing you needed to "pay" was your time.
Enter LLMs. AI has fundamentally changed how I and many others build software. The hype might not live up to reality, but it's still a massive change coming. For debugging, "boring" tasks, to give you a discussion partner. And coding of course. I vibe coded "MAJORITY Dev Wrapped 2025" just before X-Mas, in a (very late) evening as just one example.
But there's a catch - the "SOTA" (State of the Art) models aren't free.
There are open-source models you can run locally, or models that you can use for free. But the gap between a "good" local model or a free model and the latest flagship models you get access to with the top subscription to Claude is massive. To get the best results, you need a subscription. You need an API key. You need a credit card.
We are moving back to a world where your "tooling" is a subscription.
I'm in a lucky position. I have access to the latest models through my work, and even if I didn't, I could afford a subscription for one of them.
But for a teenager, a student, or someone just trying to break into tech, that $20/month for a Claude Pro subscription can be a real issue. And what's more, compared to the older times when you paid for Visual Studio the "standard" $20/month AI subscription doesn't even come with unlimited use!
When the best "coding partner" in the world is behind a paywall, the playing field is no longer level. We are seeing the emergence of a two-tier hobbyist ecosystem:
And this gap doesn't just affect what people build, it affects what they feel confident contributing to.
Ironically, AI might actually increase total OSS contributions. I've personally submitted PRs I never would have attempted before - the AI helped me understand unfamiliar codebases in minutes instead of hours.
But the source of contributions may shift. For companies, AI is absurdly cheap compared to developer salaries. For a teenager, $20/month or more is a different calculation entirely.
Open source won't die. But we might see it become more corporate-backed and less "garage coder" driven.
I don't think hobby coding is dying, but the "free" part of it is becoming an illusion. We are returning to a time where the quality of your tools is once again tied to the size of your wallet. I think that is a real shame.
And this time around you can't even "cheat" by being a pirate!
Unfortunately, even if the LLM providers wanted to, I suspect they can't give away their SOTA models for free. A colleague of mine once used $300 of LLM in a single day. Anthropic themselves writes that a developer using Claude Code spends $6/day in average. Times 30 that is $180/month! The worst part? It's not even clear if the current prices are sustainable given the massive amount of compute needed!