I am flummoxed that this service costs $120/year in the first place. Wow!

I think the article is right that a lot of people will replace such things with LLM-generated options, but I also think a lot of people won’t. For programmers and technical types, maybe so. But I suspect that for a lot of nontechnical users, even the relative ease of AI coding will remain more than they really want to do.

Have a similar experience with replacing Copilot after looking at the system prompts and wtf'n

It's certainly taken longer because it's more involved, certainly less than a month for someone already familiar with vs code extension development. A weekend project for the basics level like OP.

I hope Ai shakes up the economy in a good way, away from consolidation, because it's not working for most of us right now.