> every increase in productivity has ALWAYS gone straight to ownership.

Which of course means that if you want to capture that upside for yourself, you need to be an owner.

The real problem with AI is that it breaks that for programmers. Before AI, you actually could be an owner. Of course big tech companies tried to get you to centralize, to depend on their tools, but you didn't have to. You could always run your own open source tooling on your own hardware, and freelance if you absolutely couldn't accept the loss of upside in being an employee.

But now AI has centralized a key tool, and that changes the game, at least if you think the game requires you to use AI to stay competitive.