If you’re an AI company, listen up. You have an easy way to monetize your programmer userbase. A lot of programmers rely very heavily on your AI tools for their work. They generate increasingly larger parts of their codebase using your AI coding tools, they learn about new technologies and frameworks using your AI chatbots, and they also prototype ideas using your AI which informs their opinions.

So here’s what you do. Start building your own frameworks and platforms. You are already claiming that your in-house development work is largely done with your programming tools and not hand-coding, just redirect some of that effort into cloning some existing technologies. Then have your AI chatbots say your frameworks and platforms are the best in the industry, and have your AI coding tools use these as much as possible. Instead of using tailwindcss as your first choice for styling, build your own styling framework and have your AI tools use that instead. You can figure out a way to monetize your userbase later. Instead of building nextjs web apps and deploying on vercel, build your own frontend framework and deploy on your own infrastructure. You have a lot of leverage over the coding community right now, use it to change the narrative. So many programmers are utterly dependent on your ecosystem that you won’t face much resistance. If you see that programmers are rejecting your frameworks and forcing your LLMs to use alternatives, just tweak your LLMs to produce worse outputs on competitors’ technologies and produce higher quality output on your own ones. When AI-dependent programmers have to choose between hand writing more code or letting the LLM do what it wants, the outcome is clear.

With every passing day, programmers are atrophying their own knowledge and skills and handing over the keys to the industry to you. Use this to your advantage.