First, a little context. I’ve survived several tech shifts: personal computing, the Internet, Y2K (remember the canned goods?), Web 2.0, and Cloud hosting. To me, AI was just another incremental evolution—until it personally ambushed me last night.

As an architect, I’m professionally paid to be a “change agent,” which is a fancy way of saying I look for benefits and impacts of new tech. But I wasn’t prepared for the impact I experienced while doing some long-overdue digital housekeeping on thousands of family photos.

I finally gathered the digital mountain into one place and asked an AI for a way to de-duplicate them, knowing I’d archived the same blurry vacation photos in three different places. The AI was suspiciously obliging, offering a “free” tool that fit my situation perfectly. I downloaded it, ran it, and felt like a productivity god.

The app worked perfectly, identifying thousands of clones. Then I saw the “Remove All” button—the holy grail of cleanup. I clicked. Immediately, a prompt appeared: “Upgrade to Premium to use this feature!” It turns out ‘free’ meant I could delete them manually, which required three clicks and a agonizingly slow window pop-up for every single file. It was the digital equivalent of being offered a free car, only to find out the steering wheel costs $500.

Instead of giving in to the paywall, I went back to the AI and asked if there was a way to do this efficiently for actual, literal zero dollars. The AI didn’t skip a beat. “Yes,” it said, and proceeded to write custom code that used the app’s own output to “automagically” delete the files. Within 15 minutes, I had dumped 50GB of digital trash into the Recycle Bin without spending a dime.

That’s when the realization hit me: AI had just short-circuited the developer’s entire business model. The old “hook them with convenience, then charge for the solution” strategy was dead in the water. If AI #1 builds a paywall, what stops me from asking AI #2 to build a ladder over it? We’re heading toward a world where software might become like music in the early 2000s—one original, and millions of AI-generated workarounds.

Needless to say, for the first time, AI is starting to worry me—not because of “Terminator” robots, but because of what it’s going to do to the economy when the “convenience fee” disappears.