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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

> non-coders aren't dumb by default after all and I suspect they'll learn much faster than us because they won't be bogged down by the minutiae like reading docs.

They may have a perfectly good shot at being smart, but I still don't buy the argument. The reason they struggle to become coders (assuming they tried at all), in my experience, is a lack of problem-solving and debugging skills. There is no real shortcut here. An "image" of the chair isn't enough; when the first iteration is wrong, you have to be able to explain why it's wrong.

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I think there are a lot of people out there with good problem-solving skills but for whatever reason did not get into programming or they tried and they got put off with learning the languages / libraries or got stuck and didn't find a solution easily enough and gave up etc.

With a sufficiently good LLM these people will skip the tedious part of programming that most of us had the motivation / patience to go through. All the folks saying that actually writing code wasn't the bottleneck have had a LOT of years to get to that point, years a lot of people aren't interested in going through.

I'm not saying lay people will be able to join mega projects and work at FAANG. I'm saying a sufficiently courageous lay person will be able to make an app to automate whatever tedious birocratic process their niche work hasn't seen a product yet.

> All the folks saying that actually writing code wasn't the bottleneck have had a LOT of years to get to that point, years a lot of people aren't interested in going through.

The years was not spent on learning how to code. The years was spent on learning about what needed to be coded. And that would have spanned multiple domains. Even the most basic production level software have multiple concepts that need to be integrated. And for that, they need to be learned.

Using AI without the requisite knowledge is playing Russian roulette. It’s kinda wanting to log into a file, and not thinking about disk storage being finite, and rotating the log file gives you flexibility. That’s not related to coding, it’s just hard thinking about the problem and the constraints (or finding a good book or article).

> Using AI without the requisite knowledge is playing Russian roulette

Every few months that revolver has a few more empty chambers and even if it shoots them in the foot, it can bandage them quite nicely. Will a solo lay person with an agent build a high quality high reliability software business? Doubtful. Will they be able to make a tool that helps them and 10 other people or a personal website? probably.

> Will a solo lay person with an agent build a high quality high reliability software business? Doubtful. Will they be able to make a tool that helps them and 10 other people or a personal website? probably.

Just take a quick look around to see how many daily tools and utilities are actually built by experts and industries. Yes, you can put a plank on top of two concrete blocks to make a bench, but many people don’t and prefer to have good bench made, even when it’s quite easy to DIY one.

So I don’t foresee lots of people trying to make custom tools, more so to keep a subscription active.

I can absolutely believe this, actually. Considering how the access to rapid prototyping has rejuvenated my interest in programming when I am a seasoned programmer, I definitely see the value in that kind of jump-start.

And yeah, without LLMs, writing code absolutely can be the bottleneck sometimes, if only for psychological reasons. I've definitely experienced something like "coder's block" before. An anti-flow state, if you will.

(But skydhash is also right. The "unknown unknowns" are a big deal and there's only so much an LLM can do about that, at least unless the user is actively aware of the general shape of that problem and trying to learn via the LLM and fill in those knowledge gaps.)

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