I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time.

Well... we have open source for a while, and people are still reinventing the wheel every time. There's always the new chat protocol that claims to be the best, but works almost the same as all others, there's always reimplementations of some software in another language just because the developers don't like the original language. There are forks of software due to ideological divergence. There are reimplementations of famous software just for fun. There's a lot of other cases, all reinventing of the wheel, all the time.

It's arguably not always a bad thing for people to reinvent the wheel, but anyway, I see it getting MUCH worse with ai. People are already going to chatbots asking to implement things before even searching for work already done on that, and we're going to end with milions of businesses and individuals with reinvented wheels everywhere, instead of everyone using a shared codebase. If nothing happens in the near future, I see things getting less compatible with each other due to no standards in implementations

I'm incredibly against the big LLM SaaS providers and material waste besides. Anyway I don't have a crystal ball and I'm highly sceptical that this technology will work out for average people, but it sure would be interesting if it somehow lead to less corporate control and cultural enclosure rather than how it seems to be going right now.

But what about the poor corporations making money off those games that already fired all the devs that made it after overworking them?

"code is just math with syntactic sugar"

Wow!

Tell me you don't write code wihout telling me you don't write code.

Just playing devil’s advocate here; do you think an architect should not be able to own the blueprints they’ve produced?

To a slightly broader point, do you not agree with the notion that technical solutions can have creative implementations, and that that can be a form of artistry?

You could say the same about patents for physical inventions. But there are legitimate reasons for patents to exist.

What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation?

That's apple's decision, one of many to force their users to only get their devices, similarly not being able to host your own game servers benefits the publishers/ devs. (Edit for clarity: by this I mean that this state of things isn't caused by unavailability of open source solutions but rather by corporate greed.)

"Owning" algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.

Not any different from protecting one's art creations. You spend a bunch of time learning how to code and are doing it for a living so you don't want others/ competition to take it and sell as their own. Not sure what's hard to understand.