We've Seen This Movie Before

I've been sitting on this comparison for a while, trying to decide if it was too obvious to write about. Then a good friend of mine DM'd me on Slack about "every vibe coding tech bro is now vibe coding a dashboard to 'monitor the global situation'. my feed is full of it." with some screenshots of the kind of stuff that's popping up everywhere. And it just reminded me; I'm not imagining this. So. Here we are. Here's the comparison: what's happening right now with AI coding tools is the same thing that happened when Unity and Unreal Engine went free. Same pattern. Same consequences. Just faster, and with higher stakes. If you weren't around for that, let me explain. And if you were, I'm sorry for what this post is about to make you remember. The Great Game Dev Democratisation Unity launched in 2005. In 2009, they released a free tier. Active users roughly doubled on launch day. Unreal Engine 4 went completely free on March 2, 2015 — Epic kept a 5% royalty on revenue, that's it. Unity res