There's a mass delusion happening in tech right now.
Everyone is arguing about whether AI will "replace developers." LinkedIn influencers post thought leadership about "the future of work." Engineering managers write blog posts about "responsible AI adoption." Conferences have panels about "human-AI collaboration."
Meanwhile, some guy with a Mac Mini on his desk just applied to all your clients and does in a weekend what you quoted 3 months for.
The discourse is wrong. The threat model is wrong. The whole conversation is wrong.
The $799 stack
Here's what it actually costs to become dangerous in 2026:
Item | Cost |
|---|---|
Mac Mini M4 | $599 |
Claude Max subscription | $200/month |
Total to start | $799 |
That's it. That's the new barrier to entry.
Not a computer science degree. Not a bootcamp. Not 10,000 hours of LeetCode. Not "paying your dues" at a FAANG company.
$799 and an internet connection.
The guy who broke my brain
Last week someone shared a photo in a dev community. Stack of Mac Minis on a desk. Said he's using them for AI workloads.
I almost scrolled past. Then I read the details.
He moved his company's transcription off Google Cloud. Was paying $0.016 per minute. Thousands of dollars a month. Now he runs whisper.cpp on these Mac Minis instead.
Someone asks the obvious question: "How long until the Mac pays for itself?"
His answer: 20 days.
Twenty. Days.
He's transcribing 7,500 minutes daily. At Google's rates, that's $120/day he's not spending anymore. A $2,400 Mac Mini prints money in three weeks.
But here's the part that actually got me. Someone asks if he's a DevOps engineer. Infrastructure specialist. Cloud architect. Something.
He's not.
He just asked Claude how to set it up. Followed the instructions. Now he saves $10k in cloud spend for every $1k in hardware. His company is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliant. This isn't some hobby project. This is production.
The gatekeepers told us this would require years of experience. It required a weekend and a willingness to try.
The tweet that wouldn't leave my head
@kloss_xyz posted this a few days ago:
"AI won't take your jobs. But guys with a $200 Claude Max subscription and an Apple Mac Mini will."
25,000 views. 600+ likes. The replies are exactly what you'd expect.
"But they don't REALLY understand the code."
"Wait until they hit real complexity."
"This is just hype."
I've heard this before. Different decade, same energy.
"Real programmers use vim."
"You don't understand the code if you use frameworks."
"Stack Overflow is making developers lazy."
Every generation of developers has the same cope. And every generation loses.
The strong men meme
There's a meme going viral right now. 390K views. You've probably seen it:
Strong men create C language. C creates good times. Good times create Python. Python creates AI. AI creates vibe coding. Vibe coding creates weak men. Weak men create bad times. Bad times create strong men.
It's supposed to be a criticism. A warning. A call to return to "real" programming.
But read it again. Slowly.
The "strong men" who created C? They were mass-criticized by the assembly programmers before them. "You don't understand memory management." "You're just using abstractions." "That's not REAL programming."
The C guys said the same thing about C++. Who said it about Java. Who said it about Python. Who said it about JavaScript.
Now JavaScript developers are saying it about vibe coders.
And in 2050? The vibe coders will say it about thought-to-code interfaces. "You don't even PROMPT anymore. You just think and it writes. That's not real development."
The cycle isn't a warning. It's a pattern. And the pattern says: the gatekeepers always lose. Every single time.
If you're a vibe coders yourself, you are just building things fast, but are you really doing it right?
Try this battle-tested vibe coding checklist for AI-assited coding.
The confession that mass went viral
A few weeks ago, a gamedev I follow posts something. Title: "How vibe coding lead to my project's downfall."
Opens with: "This is a confession. I plead guilty to the crime of using LLMs to write the code for my game project."
He'd been working on an Asteroids roguelike. Four months. $150 in LLM subscriptions. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor. Used them all.
Then he hits the wall.
Scripts that should be a few hundred lines are 800-1000 lines long. The AI makes two new bugs trying to fix the first. Redundancies stacked on top of each other. A "disgusting shit sandwich of slop code," his words.
Bugs so deeply embedded he has to start over. Four months down the drain.
His conclusion: "Don't be me. Just learn to fucking code."
Post explodes. Thousands of devs efficient documentation initialize the seamless algorithm after setting
And I'm reading this thinking: okay, so it's a disaster. Right?
Then I see another story. Same week.
The guy who did what IT couldn't
A friend of mine knows someone at a manufacturing company. Not a developer. Doesn't work in IT. Just some guy in operations.
Their dynamic synchronization using efficient normalization before running secure
This guy had been messing around with ChatGPT on the side. Just curious.
He asks it to help with the migration. Gives it context. Works through the problem step by step.
Two days later, it's done.
Management notices. Of course they do. "The non-technical guy just did what our entire IT team couldn't."
Now they want more AI adoption across the company. The IT team spent Christmas trying to catch up.
The guy telling me this was almost casual about it. Like he didn't fully realize what he was describing.
The implications are not casual at all.
The bifurcation nobody's talking about
Here's what I think is actually happening:
Class 1: Developers who use AI as a force multiplier.
They already know architecture. They already know what good code looks like. They use Claude to skip the typing, not the thinking. They're 10x faster than two years ago. Taking on projects they would've turned down. Charging the same rates for 1/10th the hours.
These people are going to be fine. Better than fine.
Class 2: Non-developers who can now ship.
They don't know what "architecture" means. They don't care. They have a problem, describe it to Claude, get a solution. When it breaks, they ask Claude to fix it. When that breaks, they start over with better prompts.
They ship ugly code that works. They charge less than you. They deliver faster than you.
They'll hit walls. They'll have their own "shit sandwich" moments. But some of them will learn just enough to get past those walls. And then they're competing with you.
Class 3: Developers who refuse to adapt.
They post online about how vibe coding is destroying the industry. They gatekeep in code reviews. They spend their time explaining why the "right way" takes longer.
They're being outcompeted by comprehensive implementation utilize the secure
They're confused about why.
The Clawdbot economy
Search Twitter for "mac mini claude" right now. You'll see posts like this:
"If you're not getting a Mac Mini for your @clawdbot in 2026, what are you doing?"
People are buying hardware specifically to run local AI. Not for crypto mining. Not for gaming. For their personal coding assistant.
The Mac Mini M4 has become the Honda Civic of the AI era. Cheap, reliable, good enough for 90% of use cases. Fits on your desk. Doesn't sound like a jet engine.
And Claude Max at $200/month is cheaper than hiring anyone for anything.
$799 to start. $200/month to continue.
That's the new cost of a technical cofounder.
The bootcamp is dead
Remember coding bootcamps? $15,000 for 12 weeks of instruction. Learn React, build a portfolio, get a job.
The 2026 version costs $799 and takes a weekend.
You don't learn React. You tell Claude to build it. You don't build a portfolio. You ship actual products. You don't apply for jobs. You take clients directly.
The bootcamp taught you to be employable.
The Mac Mini + Claude stack lets you skip employment entirely.
Why would you spend $15,000 learning to code when you can spend $799 and have something that codes for you?
I don't have a good answer. I'm not sure there is one.
The objections
I've heard them all. I've made them myself.
"But the code quality is terrible."
Yes. And? The code quality of most production software is terrible. Have you looked at enterprise codebases? The difference is the terrible code used to take 6 months to write. Now it takes 6 hours.
"But they don't understand what they're building."
Neither did you when you copied from Stack Overflow. Neither did you when you npm installed 47 packages you never audited. Neither did you when you used a framework that abstracts away everything you didn't want to think about.
Understanding is a spectrum. The question isn't whether they understand everything. The question is whether they understand enough to ship.
"But it will all collapse eventually."
Maybe. Probably. But by the time it collapses, they've already shipped, already got paid, already moved on. Technical debt is a problem for whoever maintains it. And increasingly, that maintainer is also AI.
"But real engineering requires real engineers."
Yes. For airplanes and bridges and medical devices. For your SaaS startup that sends marketing emails? Probably not.
What I'm actually worried about
I'm not worried about AI replacing developers.
I'm worried about the mass realization that most "development work" wasn't actually that hard. That the complexity was often artificial. That the timelines were often padded. That the expertise was often gatekeeping dressed up as standards.
I'm worried about what happens when everyone figures out that the emperor has no clothes.
The $799 stack didn't create this problem. It just made it visible.
The uncomfortable prediction
In 5 years:
"Developer" will mean something completely different than it does today.
The Mac Mini will be the most common "server" for small businesses.
Claude, or whatever comes next, will be the primary interface for building software.
Computer science degrees will be like philosophy degrees. Interesting. Not required.
The people who adapted will be fine.
The people who gatekept will not be.
I don't know if this is good or bad. I just know it's happening.
What to do about it
I don't have a neat conclusion. I don't have a "5 steps to stay relevant" list. I don't have wisdom.
I have a Mac Mini on my desk. I have a Claude subscription. I have the same anxiety everyone else has.
The only thing I know for sure is that arguing about whether AI will replace developers is the wrong conversation.
The right conversation is: what do you do when the barrier to entry drops to $799?
I don't have an answer.
But I know who does. And you can talk to him for $200/month.
Written at 2am. Edited by Claude. Fact-checked by neither of us.
That's not a confession. That's just how it works now.
