> I think the same is currently happening with coding, except it will allow single builders and designers to do the same thing as an entire team 5 years ago.

This part of your post I think signals that you are either very new or haven't been paying attention; single developers were outperforming entire teams on the regular long before LLMs were a thing in software development, and they still are. This isn't because they're geniuses, but rather because you don't get any meaningful speedup out of adding team members.

I've always personally thought there is a sweet spot at about 3 programmers where you still might see development velocity increase, but that's probably wrong and I just prefer it to not feel too lonely.

In any case teams are not there to speed anything up, and anyone who thinks they are is a moron. Many, many people in management are morons.

I think one thing that goes unmentioned is that maybe code quality is really not that important for trivial things, because they can be trivially reproduced if need be. I would argue Claude Code is exactly such a project; coding agents are incredibly simple and rewriting CC wouldn't be much of a problem.

Non-trivial things tend to be much more sensitive to code quality in my experience, and will by necessity be kept around for longer and thus be much more sensitive to maintenance issues.

Closed source AI is mostly US with all of the nonsense that entails, on top of being closed source. I don't think this is the even comparison you seem to think it is.

The rest of the world probably doesn't look at this equation and say "Oh, yeah, China is so much worse than the US that it really offsets the fact that all of these models are closed and controlled by billionaires who want to jail people in their walled gardens."

This is not meant as a "what about...", to be clear. I just think you're off base if you think that people view the US significantly more favorably than China.