It has been brought up relatively often that the rhythm of development on Hive doesn't keep up with the best places in crypto in that regard. There have been many explanations for that:
Those seem quite serious obstacles and they are, but... they'll improve. Work has been and is being done to make the onboarding process much easier at the level of a lite Hive account. That is not the same a full Hive account, but most users might not need a full account anyway.
The funding issue is not as easy to be resolved. Processes and control over the use of funds can be optimized, the price of Hive may improve, new money may come in. But we would still be a small place in terms of funding compared to places like Ethereum, Solana, etc.
However... what if costs go way down and we don't need as much money? That's an interesting perspective, right? And an equalizer, perhaps... in terms of software development.
Hive has already focused a lot on optimizing costs for node operators, to the point it is now possible to run a node on a Raspberry Pi, if I'm not mistaken. That's powerful for decentralization, resilience, and an equalizing factor between networks with tons of money and those that need to be careful with their funding, like Hive.
You know what else drives costs down in a major way? If you said AI, you nailed it.
While that's a death sentence for human labor, on Hive there is a lack of motivated experienced developers who want to build on the chain. However, if suddenly building on Hive becomes much easier, less costly, less time-consuming, would more do it? Would those already building on Hive be much more productive? Most likely yes to both questions.
I know we are small, but imagine if the web3 part of a game on whatever else chain could easily be written for Hive from another incompatible chain, by AI. Would the devs of that game do it? Why not? They would attract another community to their game, at minimum costs in terms of money and time.
I got pulled into this topic after seeing how excited 
From my own limited experience by comparison, I have found Claude models the best for coding as well.
Among the top-tier AI firms, I trust Anthropic the most, after listening to enough of them (including its CEO, Dario Amodei), and also seeing some of their research published where they clearly pointed to the threats and presented openly cases where their models went haywire. Of course, they have investors, and their influence could be strong. Plus the government, for sure. Both Amazon and Alphabet are strategic investors into Anthropic, on top of a bunch of VCs, some investing many billion dollars into the company.
There should probably a fine line between the level of autonomy these AI models/agents are given and the restrictions and control, because otherwise everything could work fantastic until something goes terribly wrong.
But otherwise, the productivity boost is undeniable. One person can do the work of many (so they don't need to hire/externalize as much, or the same team can do the work of a much larger team, quicker). One person can either be guided to use tools they had no idea existed or they can allow the agent to do things instead.
