Why would you ever hire someone to help with a personal open source project?
I wouldn't, but I can pay Claude
because we want to support open source? Even if you're independence maximalist, you still pay other people in your life to do things for you at some point. If you've got the money and the desire but not the time, why does that not seem reasonable to you?
Depends on if the goal is to solve a problem (by writing code) or the goal is to write code (maybe solving a problem)