Basically boils down to FOMO, no one wants to be left behind. Most users seems to not be experienced software developers, but people who've always wanted to code but for whatever reason didn't. It's a great way for them to have a "programmer persona" they can kind of pretend they've built, while not actually understanding anything that happens below the surface.

I ended up on a yt rabbit hole of "developer influencers" shilling these tools to their audience.

It looks like a sub category of wantrepreneurs who pray on wannabe developers. They never worked on anything of importance but cosplay as domain experts and sell their expertise to people who don't know better. "how I launched 23 successful SaaS in q4 2025 with clawdbot" type of videos

Mine blew through $50 of OpenRouter credits in a single day. Not worth it.

Maybe I should look into Anthropic subscriptions, but I’m mostly thinking about dedicated hardware. A used Mac Studio M1 Ultra can has I impressive memory bandwidth…

if it's made by a 4channer, it's probably stolen API keys

They usually use their 20$/month Claude/ChatGPT subscription

Burn unused CC pro tokens?