> Around a year ago [...] It was janky, ugly, and getting there was a process.

Last December/January seems to have been the tipping point from too flawed to be really useful into something pretty good for dev work, so this seems about right.

Hardware is going to get cheaper (as it always does over the long term) and even if the commercial models enshittify¹ to something too contaminated by ads to be bearable the open models won't. We're not going back.

For now it looks like the ability to lead these tools to good solutions is valuable. I guess we'll see if it carries on so. Not much we can do if it isn't except move with the times.

¹ I'm actually fairly optimistic about that at the moment because so far we are the customers.