I wrote this story after a personal experience with Claude Code. While it was designing a frontend for me, I realized it had inserted a library I never asked for. That's when it hit me: we're underestimating the second-order effect of AI assistants becoming the new distribution channel for developer tools.
When an AI model suggests a code block that imports a specific library (like an auth provider or a client for a SaaS API), it's effectively making a default choice for the developer. This creates an incredibly powerful—and potentially very lucrative—flywheel for the owners of those suggested libraries. It's a new form of vendor lock-in that doesn't happen in a sales meeting, but in a developer's editor, one auto-completed line at a time.
I'm curious how others see this playing out. Are there technical solutions, like a "nutrition label" for AI-suggested code that flags commercial dependencies? Or is this an unavoidable evolution of software distribution, turning companies like OpenAI and Anthropic into the new gatekeepers of the dev stack?
I wrote this story after a personal experience with Claude Code. While it was designing a frontend for me, I realized it had inserted a library I never asked for. That's when it hit me: we're underestimating the second-order effect of AI assistants becoming the new distribution channel for developer tools.
When an AI model suggests a code block that imports a specific library (like an auth provider or a client for a SaaS API), it's effectively making a default choice for the developer. This creates an incredibly powerful—and potentially very lucrative—flywheel for the owners of those suggested libraries. It's a new form of vendor lock-in that doesn't happen in a sales meeting, but in a developer's editor, one auto-completed line at a time.
I'm curious how others see this playing out. Are there technical solutions, like a "nutrition label" for AI-suggested code that flags commercial dependencies? Or is this an unavoidable evolution of software distribution, turning companies like OpenAI and Anthropic into the new gatekeepers of the dev stack?
I forgot to mention, my analysis says that this could be $20b annual recurring revenue.