>> Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone
As someone who recently started using OpenSCAD for a project I find this attitude quite irritating. You certainly did not "have to" use popular tools.
The OpenSCAD example is particularly illuminating because it's fussy and frustrating and clearly tuned towards a few specific maintainers; there's a ton of things I'd like changed. But I would never trust an LLM to do it! "Oh the output looks fine, cool" is not enough for a CAD program. "Oh, there are a lot of tests, cool" great, I have no idea what a thorough CAD test suite looks like. I would be a reckless idiot if I asked Claude to make me a custom SCAD program... unless I put in a counterproductive amount of work. So I'm fine with OpenSCAD.
I am also sincerely baffled as to how this stimulates the "labor economy." The most obvious objection is that Anthropic seems to be the only party here getting any form of economic benefit: the open-source maintainers are just plain screwed unless they compromise quality for productivity, and the LLM users are trading high-quality tooling built by people who understand the problem for shitty tooling built by a robot, in exchange for uncompensated labor. It only stimulates the "labor economy" in a Bizarro Keynesian sense, digging up glass bottles that someone forgot to put the money in.
I have seen at least 4 completely busted vibe-coded Rust SQLite clones in the last three months, happily used by people who think they don't need to worry their pretty little heads with routine matters like database design. It's a solved problem and Claude is on the case! In fact unlike those stooopid human SQLIte developers, Claude made it multithreaded! So fucking depressing.