It was also about reproducibility. The ability to bootstrap from almost nothing (of course we can’t fab our own CPUs but with riscv we’re closer to the silicon than we’ve ever been). Software could always be brought back. And now the reliance is too much on closed source ecosystems. And open weights are about as open as an “open exe”. Yes the bits are there but they are almost meaningless, not reproducible.

I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent

Savagely the truth.

I guess if your joy is outputting a lot of stuff. It’s really satisfying to actually learn things and we know llms disrupt the learning process.