Even if they were making a profit, their scale and expertise will obviously give you a cheaper product than what you can build.

Maybe today but it's not a law of nature. It seems inevitable that AI models and coding agents will be fully commoditized eventually, just like computers, game engines, compilers, web servers, and so many other technologies have been.

At the end of the day, AI models are relatively small files that we run little CUDA programs on.

What kind of usage chews through Claude Max x20? I use several agents with max effort in parallel and usually end up with something like 50% weekly usage. Fable almost allowed me to get to 70% but then they started resetting the limits mid-week and of course now ended the whole thing.

Same reason why several projects have integrated Lua to their runtime over the past 30 years. Extensibility and hot reloading.

If we ever get that technology, of course it will be the worst possible people who will first get immortality.