I survey the rise of AI coding tools, from ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to open source ecosystems, alongside skeptic concerns about training data, code quality, model collapse, and code exfiltration. I explain why these assistants suit my situation as an experienced developer new to modern languages, and trace my journey from paid Copilot to the free Codium and finally to running local models via Ollama and the Continue VSCode extension to keep client code private...
