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No, I cannot 'charge' for my contributions to open source, because they are distributed for everyone to use for free. That's a rather large part of the point.

No. Programmers do not make "a lot". People owning the companies employing programmers make "a lot". Programmers make "a salary" and usually not an especially large one either. You know why? Because there's always another hopeful just waiting to be exploited until they finally break under the strain and are inevitably discarded. Job security? What's that? Can I eat it?

Gratitude for hard work? Loyalty in kind? Companies do not exist to be a surrogate family or to be a friend. They exist to produce profit and a return on investment. We exist to be a resource for them to consume to achieve that end, whereupon our remains go in the trash.

And that was five years ago. Now the owners are looking to replace us all with ChatGPT or Claude, which don't ask pesky questions like "why doesn't my salary increase to match inflation?" or "didn't vacations use to be a thing?"

I'm not going to do a write up on why AI vibe coding will fail miserably here, but when it does, I know who'll be expected to clean up the mess the usual greedy short-sighted incompetent idiots have created -- for pennies on the dollar.

And we'll have no choice but to - once again - clench our teeth, bend over the barrel and get it done. Practically everything you and I and everybody else needs to do on a daily basis now rests on a computer system somewhere along the line, and we have to live here too.

Unfortunately.