+1. Ex-product manager in the SF Bay. Retooling as a product engineer/ product builder because I can build and tinker confidently with LLM assistance, and I wa

+1. Ex-product manager in the SF Bay. Retooling as a product engineer/ product builder because I can build and tinker confidently with LLM assistance, and I want to reduce my dependencies. So I’m: * prioritizing local Qwen codegen so I can cancel my OpenAI subscription. * watching CS lectures and learning the fundamentals from the ground up. Maybe it’s the long-term unemployment talking, but I think the open-model strategy is winning and will continue to win. The recent stories about AI budgets are just the beginning. Wait until executives realize that the advertised “$X.XX per million tokens” is only part of the bill. Context windows, system prompts, conversation history, RAG, tool calls, and orchestration all add up. Cost-conscious companies will have a strong incentive to hire engineers who can run, customize, and maintain open models rather than paying indefinitely for closed APIs.