AI Companies: Your New Plugs? 🔌

AI companies aren’t just selling productivity tools. They’re dealing.

The whole “vibe coding” movement is built on a specific kind of rush - those effortless wins where you feel like a 10x dev for twenty minutes. But the business model is engineered for withdrawal. They give you just enough of a dose to get through a task or two before you hit the wall: the usage limit.

Suddenly, the flow just stops.

Take this site, for example. It’s literally three pages. I was using a brainstorm plugin with Claude to help develop a single page, and that one session wiped out over 50% of my “Pro” limit. I had enough “dosage” left for maybe a couple more quick fixes before the tap ran dry. On a three-page site.

That’s when it hits you: you can’t even keep going without the tool anymore. You’re left staring at a reset timer or a checkout page, realizing you’re stuck. You either pay the usage-rate for your next hit, or you sit there counting the minutes until your limit resets so you can feel productive again.

The worst part? You don’t really have a choice. The “free” open-source models aren’t even in the same league. They don’t give you that same high-level output, so you can’t just walk away.

It’s a pay-to-play game where the house always wins.