A senior engineer with 15 years of experience told me she starts panicking on the 20th of every month.
I asked why.
She said her GitHub Copilot AI credits are almost exhausted by then, and without it, she literally cannot deliver work anymore.
15 years of experience. Panicking because an AI subscription is running low.
And I’m not laughing at her. I’m thinking about what this actually means.
Every company right now is quietly building a workforce that is 100% dependent on AI to write code, make decks, draft emails, do literally everything they used to do with their own hands and brain.
And the AI providers know this.
Once that dependency is deep enough and it already is for a lot of people, you will pay whatever they charge. Because the alternative is not being able to do your job at all.
We’ve seen it with cloud, with SaaS, with every platform that became infrastructure.
The difference this time is it’s not companies locked into a vendor. It’s individual human beings locked out of their own skills.