> The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you.

The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.

AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.

> The biggest barrier was time

I am going to agree, albeit from an entirely different perspective.

My job has nothing to do with programming. Aside from administrative tasks, my job has nothing to do with computers. Yet I know how to program and I realize that automating those administrative tasks will have huge benefits for me. The problem is my employer doesn't pay me to write code, so I never got around to that automation.

Realistically speaking, writing that code without AI would not offer much in the way of understanding or expertise. Most of it is: "look up X, if A then B, else C, iterate" type tasks. There is a barrier in knowledge with respect to library calls, but that's pretty close to junk knowledge (it's rapidly obsoleted, and useless if I need to interface with different software).

So the choice is between doing without, or spending a lot of time picking up tasks that are of no value to me. Time was the barrier.

These arguments also remind me a lot of the microcomputer revolution: a heck of a lot of mainframe COBOL and FORTRAN developers were critical of underpowered computers and toy programming languages. The reality is that it opened up opportunities for a new generation of developers, and new types of software was created because the problem solvers were closer to the problem.

AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much.

Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable.

The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done.

Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with.

As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority!

However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely?

These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.

The biggest barrier for people with knowledge, understanding, expertise, and the willingness to work hard was certainly time. But there were a lot of people with plenty of time that never got anything done.

In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.

I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).

> The biggest barrier was time.

Only if you have all the rest sorted, and that’s a big if. It’s also circular. You need time to achieve most of it.

> And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.

Nothing against that. As I mentioned, there’s utility there. I don’t think it’s bad to put these tools to use. But this idea of having “a bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems” without understanding what they do or reviewing their output (due to whatever reason), in other words putting the effort and understanding the output, is exactly what I was talking about.

A lot of these people didn't really care about those virtues they claim they represent. They just wanted power and control over something.