When Money Buys Thinking: A New Day in the Life of Developers

Written while waiting for Claude Code to reset after a 5-hour block.

Apparently, even thinking now comes with a cooldown.

There was a time when developer productivity was shaped mainly by skill, experience, and long hours in front of a screen. Better tools helped, but they helped everyone more or less equally. AI agents have broken that balance. For the first time in the history of software, money does not just buy infrastructure or licenses. It buys thinking itself.

Today, paying more for AI means you get more minds running in parallel. More attempts. More perspectives. More rounds of critique. The real limit is no longer what you know, but how much reasoning you can afford to run at the same time.

Imagine a very ordinary morning for two frontend developers building an internal dashboard. Nothing fancy. React, a couple of APIs, tables, forms, permissions.

The first developer opens VS Code and uses a single AI assistant. He asks how to reduce unnecessary re renders in a component. The AI answers, he tweaks the code, refreshes the browser, sees it working, and commits. It feels familiar, like a normal workday for millions of developers.

The second developer starts differently. When the project opens, he spins up a small group of agents. One reads the codebase and reconstructs the state and data flow. Another plays the role of a harsh reviewer, looking for UX edge cases. A third simulates users entering invalid data, losing network connection, or refreshing the tab mid action. Another compares the current patterns with similar projects and points out where this code will hurt in six months.

While he drinks his coffee, hundreds of simulated interactions run. When he starts coding, most decisions are already filtered. He is not smarter. He is paying for parallel thought.

The difference shows up less in typing speed and more in the number of times he thinks, good thing we caught that early. Bugs still exist, but they surface sooner, when they are cheap to fix.

The same story plays out on the backend. A boring CRUD API. Create users, update profiles, basic permissions. One developer codes it, tests a few cases, deploys. The other lets agents try everything people usually avoid testing. Two updates racing each other. Tokens expiring halfway through a request. Null data in places that probably will not happen. When production traffic arrives, the second system is quieter. Not because it has fewer users, but because someone paid to worry in advance.

Even writing SQL starts to look different. A slow reporting query is something everyone has seen. The usual approach is to add an index, test again, and stop when it is fast enough. Another approach is to let agents generate dozens of query variants, simulate data growth, run them on different engines, and highlight where performance collapses when the table becomes ten times larger. The developer is not more talented. He just bought a glimpse of the near future.

What makes this uncomfortable is how invisible the inequality is. Both developers push code. Both get reviews. Both repositories look clean. But one of them has hundreds of hours of outsourced reasoning behind every commit. You cannot see that in Git history or on a résumé.

As generating code becomes cheap, taste becomes scarce. AI is excellent at adding things. More options, more abstractions, more features. It almost never says stop. Developers with good taste know when to cut, when to delete, when to keep systems simple enough for humans to understand. In the future, the valuable skill is not accepting everything an agent suggests, but rejecting most of it.

This is why the near future is not about developers being replaced. It is about developers being amplified. Some are amplified far more than others simply because they can afford it. The rest still exist, but they are pushed toward narrower problems where judgment, domain knowledge, and long term thinking matter more than brute force reasoning.

And this is where the picture turns sad.

Software used to be one of the few professions where you could start with almost nothing. A cheap laptop, an internet connection, and enough patience could take you very far. AI agents are quietly closing that door. Not with a loud announcement, but by widening the gap between those who can pay for thinking and those who cannot, until effort alone can no longer close it.

Poor developers do not disappear overnight. But they are pushed to the edges. Slower paths. Smaller impact. The big decisions, the complex systems, the products that shape reality increasingly belong to those who can afford more cognition.

It is a hard truth. A world where being a developer is no longer a profession for the capital poor. A world where productivity is measured not just in skill, but in monthly AI bills.

The sadness is not that the technology is evil. It is that it reveals something very human. When intelligence becomes a commodity, inequality becomes impossible to ignore.