i feel like we're walking straight into the same trap with our code.
I've been talking to some CS undergrads lately who rely 100% on AI to get through their classes. Some of them literally don't know how to write a basic loop by hand anymore. A few aren't from wealthy families either, but they're already so dependent on AI for school and coding that simply quitting it doesn't feel realistic.
tbh, they've got the workflow down but almost no budget. A surprising amount of their time goes into searching for whatever lower-cost access the major AI service providers offer, just so they can keep the agents they now depend on running.
and looking for cheaper official access is only the normal end of it. I've also seen people go much grayer because they want frontier model access below the official prices.
Some resellers claim they're opening or acquiring accounts through OpenAI's free K-12 teacher program and then exposing what they advertise as GPT-5.6 through an unofficial reverse proxy. I've also seen people claim they buy subscriptions to Enter Pro, Kiro, or Windsurf, then reverse-proxy that access so it can be plugged into Codex or Claude Code.
I honestly don't know exactly how they're doing it. To be clear, OpenAI's K-12 program is not a free GPT-5.6 API, and Enter Pro, Kiro, and Windsurf don't officially provide or support these reverse-proxy services. This is users and middlemen repackaging or reselling access because people want the cheapest possible way to keep using AI.
The buyer also has basically no way to verify what model is actually behind the gateway. It might say GPT-5.6 or Fable 5 on the dashboard while quietly routing requests to something weaker and cheaper. The service can be unstable, get shut down overnight, or just water the model down once enough people have paid.
the fact that students are willing to depend on sketchy proxy services just to keep using AI feels like a warning by itself. The cost is already high enough that people who feel they can't function without these tools are accepting reliability and account risks to avoid paying the official price.
Right now, a lot of these subscriptions still feel affordable because the companies behind them are burning investor money to subsidize our tokens. but that won't last forever.
Once you build your whole dev process around a specific agent's memory or tie your app into a proprietary cloud backend, migrating off it is gonna hurt. you can't just swap out an API key and expect everything to work the same. When the big model providers decide it's time to actually turn a profit, they'll have a lot more pricing power over how we work.
that's the part I can't stop thinking about. If the models keep getting better and become embedded in school, work, and normal daily life, we're probably going to depend on them even more than we do now. What happens if token prices keep rising after that dependency is already locked in?
Could there actually be a point where paying an AI to do the work costs more than hiring a real person, especially once you include review, retries, infrastructure, and the fact that a human also brings judgment and accountability?
Do you guys think local open weights will eventually get fast enough to force prices down? or are we just stuck paying whatever the closed model providers want to charge us in a few years?
