Those examples are all either zero cost or "buy once, use forever." How is that an argument against outsourcing your core competency to third party in perpetuity?

It's an argument against the original argument:

> you're at the mercy of the AI companies

You are not at the mercy of anyone. There are capable, open models that are self-hostable. For example, JetBrains IDEs come with a free local model [1] that runs on your CPU, which is exactly "buy once, use forever". If you want a bit more oomph a consumer level Nvidia GPU or Apple Silicon is sufficient.

> outsourcing your core competency to third party

I don't think my core competency is remembering obscure syntax, or being able to perform repetitive tasks. But if that's true, then I'm screwed anyway. My employer can simply pay an AI company 100 bucks a month and fire me. My own resistance against using LLMs won't change anything. The only logical thing to do would be to accept that my core competency is no longer valuable, and find another core competency.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/