[anonfunction]

I'll take a counterpoint, coding has historically not been cheap. Software engineers have been one of the highest paid professions for a long time. Personally while working a full time job, raising a family and trying to have some semblance of a social life my open source contributions fell off a cliff until recently with the popularization of coding agents. I've created more projects and software in the last 12 months than the past 10 years combined. Not to say a lot of it wasn't total slop or provided little utility, but it's been a fun and exciting time.

Another interesting point is that until recently most average people thought "code" was out of reach or they didn't have time / energy to learn it. My mother made a webapp with the help of claude code the other day to generate books, which she thought of and completed in the course of 3 days all the while learning about terminals, localhost, ports, APIs and more.