I wrote this story after a personal experience with Claude Code. While it was designing a frontend for me, I realized it had inserted a library I never asked for. That's when it hit me: we're underestimating the second-order effect of AI assistants becoming the new distribution channel for developer tools.
When an AI model suggests a code block that imports a specific library (like an auth provider or a client for a SaaS API), it's effectively making a default choice for the developer. This creates an incredibly powerful—and potentially very lucrative—flywheel for the owners of those suggested libraries. It's a new form of vendor lock-in that doesn't happen in a sales meeting, but in a developer's editor, one auto-completed line at a time.
I'm curious how others see this playing out. Are there technical solutions, like a "nutrition label" for AI-suggested code that flags commercial dependencies? Or is this an unavoidable evolution of software distribution, turning companies like OpenAI and Anthropic into the new gatekeepers of the dev stack?
gkv856•3h ago
When an AI model suggests a code block that imports a specific library (like an auth provider or a client for a SaaS API), it's effectively making a default choice for the developer. This creates an incredibly powerful—and potentially very lucrative—flywheel for the owners of those suggested libraries. It's a new form of vendor lock-in that doesn't happen in a sales meeting, but in a developer's editor, one auto-completed line at a time.
I'm curious how others see this playing out. Are there technical solutions, like a "nutrition label" for AI-suggested code that flags commercial dependencies? Or is this an unavoidable evolution of software distribution, turning companies like OpenAI and Anthropic into the new gatekeepers of the dev stack?