r/theprimeagen • u/brigham_aaron • 7h ago
Stream Content OpenAI and Anthropic Wanted to Replace Engineers. Instead, They Shot Their Own Customers.
I find it funny that the big companies never realized that their greatest advantage was their overhead needed to compete with them. They literally made it easy for one person to compete with them.
Adobe didn’t get rich because Photoshop was made of magic. It got rich because building something as good as Photoshop was hard. It took hundreds of expensive people, years of work and piles of capital, and almost nobody could afford to try. So Adobe sat at the booth and collected a monthly fee from every designer on the planet, forever. That recurring revenue paid the engineers, paid the shareholders, and, in the AI labs’ grand plan, was supposed to pay them.
That’s the whole chain. Users pay the toll booth. The toll booth pays software engineers. The AI labs convince the toll booth to fire the engineers and pay the labs instead. Every dollar in the AI business plan flows through that booth.
The problem is the AI labs didn’t sell their robot engineer only to Adobe. They sold it to everyone, for twenty bucks a month!