I Don't Want to Pay a Subscription to Program

One point I haven't explicitly heard in the great AI debate, though it's been palpable, is the anxiety of having to be on the hook to pay a subscription fee to write code.

I'm sure most professional software engineers, either contracted or employed, can readily afford to pay a $20 per month subscription to OpenAI or whomever. It's also not completely out of the ordinary to pay for services in the line of professional work. The difference is that the use of AI coding agents changes the core practice of programming. There are likely software engineers being trained today to critically rely on an AI coding agent as a part of their workflow. Having to pay a subscription fee to perform a basic skill or trade seems out of the ordinary, to say the least. For example, let's say you suddenly had to pay a regular fee to play the piano or build things with wood.

Of course no one is literally compelled to use AI services for anything. In an abstract way, however, all software engineers who care about efficiency (i.e. all software engineers.) are compelled to integrate an LLM into their workflow in some way. This even applies to people who love to program. I love programming as much as or more than the next guy but there is a lot of grunt code that I would have no issue with an AI coding agent taking off my hands. All other things equal, why would you not save time if you could?

In this vein, LLMs are emerging as a new tool in a class of tools like emacs macros, automatic refactorers, or static analyzers. Essential and commoditized tools upon which the efficient software engineer relies. This isn't bad on its own but it's bad when basic tools are charged for like services. I don't want software engineering to become like graphic design (Thanks Adobe) or CAD (Thanks Autodesk). Not only is it unusual but it doesn't seem globally efficient or optimal for the economy or even the progress of humanity.

The prospect of meaningfully improving my efficiency by integrating an LLM into my workflow excites me, despite my ethical concerns with how LLMs are trained. To that end, I'm a lot more comfortable with AI coding agents if my AI coding agent is local and self-hosted. To the extent that local models are critically inferior to hosted models, and I have to subscribe to a service to work efficiently at a basic level, I am anxious.

Rian Hunter
2025-06-12