This is the thing a lot of skeptics aren't grappling with. Software engineering as a profession is mostly about building software that can operate at scale. If you remove scale from the equation then you can remove a massive chunk of the complexity required to build useful software.

There are a ton of recipe management apps out there, and all of them are more complex than I really need. They have to be, because other people looking for recipe management software have different needs and priorities. So I just vibe coded my own recipe management app in an afternoon that does exactly what I want and nothing more. I'm sure it would crash and burn if I ever tried to launch it at scale, but I don't have to care about that.

If I was in the SaaS business I would be extremely worried about the democratization of bespoke software.

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PaulHoule 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tools for the non-professional developer to put their skills on wheels have always been part of the equation since we've had microcomputers if not minicomputer, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

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selridge 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But they’ve always basically required that you essentially become a programmer at the end of the day in order to get those benefits. The spreadsheet is probably the largest intruder in this ecosystem, but that’s only the case. If you don’t think that operating a spreadsheet is programming. It is.

What people are describing is that Normies can now do the kinds of things that only wizards with PERL could do in the 90s. The sorts of things that were always technically possible with computers if you were a very specific kind of person are now possible with computers for everyone else.

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PaulHoule an hour ago | parent [-]

That's partially true.

Languages like BASIC and Python have always been useful to people for whom programming is a part-time thing. Sure you have to learn something but it is not like learning assembly or C++.

On the other hand, it is notorious that people who don't know anything about programming can accomplish a little bit with LLM tools and then they get stuck.

It's part of what is so irksome about the slop blog posts about AI coding that HN is saturated with now. If you've accomplished something with AI coding it is because of: (1) your familiarity with the domain you're working in and (2) your general knowledge about how programming environments work. With (1) and (2) you can recognize the different between a real solution and a false solution and close the gap when something "almost works". Without it, you're going to go around in circles at best. People are blogging as if their experience with prompting or their unscientific experiments about this model and that model were valuable but they're not, (1) and (2) are valuable, anything specific about AI coding 2026-02-18 will be half-obsolete on 2026-02-19; so of course they face indifference.

	▲	selridge 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think even BASIC and Python don’t get out of “programming”. Nether did SQL. They’re friendlier interfaces to programming but the real barrier is still understanding the model of computation PLUS understanding the quirks of the language (often quite hard to separate for a newbie!). I think professional programmers think that Python or JS is somehow magically more accessible because it’s not something nasty like C++, but that’s not really a widely shared or easily justified opinion. Also who cares if someone gets going with an LLM and gets stuck? Not like that’s new! GitHub is littered with projects made by real programmers that got stuck well before any real functionality. The advantage of getting stuck with a frontier code agent is you can get unstuck. But again, who cares?! It’s not like folks who could program were really famous for extending grace and knowledge to those who couldn’t, so it’s unlikely some rando getting stuck is something that impacts you. I don’t know what slop blog stuff you’re talking about. I think you should take some time to read people who have made this stuff work; it’s less magic than you might think, just hard work.

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skydhash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of people don’t care about software other than the fact that the ones they use work well. They don’t want to create it, to maintain it, or to upgrade it. That’s what the IT department is for.

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3vidence 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This seems like a big HN / VC bubble thing thinking that average people are interested in software at all... they really aren't.

People want to open Netflix / YT / TikTok, open instagram, scroll reddit, take pictures, order stuff online, etc. Then professionals in fields want to read / write emails, open drawings, CADs, do tax returns, etc.

If anything overall interest in software seems to be going down for the average person compared to 2010s. I feel like most of the above normal people are going to stop using in favor of LLMs. LLMs certainly do compete with Googling for regular people though and writing emails.

	▲	layer8 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It just means that they want the software they use to work well, even if they aren’t particularly aware that what they use is software.