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6 hours ago
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Rock climbing is one of my favourite ways to blow off steam. Whenever I tell people about that hobby, I get a common response: "Sounds really cool, but I could never do that because of my fear of heights…"
Fear of heights is real, and it's something we all have. In order to climb, we need to conquer that fear. And the only way to conquer that fear is... to climb.
Their answer does not tell us they would love to go rock climbing but are unable to overcome their crippling fear. It tells us they don't care for the sport. If they really wanted to climb, they'd climb.
There's a parallel to people calling themselves non-technical. "Oh, I'd love to build apps like you, but I'm not technical". This canned response doesn't mean they are unable to learn how a REST call works. It tells us they don't care for the skill. If they really wanted to build...
People tell these aspirational white lies as a kind of social lubricant. It builds rapport while saying nothing. “We have much in common if only my cards were dealt differently.”. The truth is that, at the sight of the first error message, they bail out. They like the idea of building their own apps, but they loathe the process of building, the specification and debugging. They find no joy in arm wrestling the machine.
They might say they want to build, but their actions show us something different. That’s quite the uphill battle for tools that give non-techies the power to build!
In the nineties, CASE tools promised us the end of the software engineer. Instead of paying an expensive nerd to write bulky Java code, the business analyst would specify requirements in UML. Together would generate most of the code. That didn't work out.
Visual Basic famously kicked off the Citizen Developer revolution, where everyone would build their own apps. While today there is a computer in every home indeed, the vast majority of those machines don't get used to develop personal apps. It just didn't happen.
Last decade's wave of No-Code tools would put the power in the hands of Business departments. They no longer had to wait for their Engineering teams. They would just drag, click and drop their own apps. Again, that revolution never materialised.
Non-techies were enthusiastic about these tools, but despite marketing efforts, they didn't go further than building trivial apps and demos.
So: why would LLMs be different? What is so special about ChatGPT and vibe coding that non-techies will pick it up this time? The answer is, most likely, nothing.
It's been months since Andrej Karpathy coined the term vibe coding. It's been over a year since Devin notoriously promised to put engineers out of a job. Take a look at the Lovable showcase. Toys, proof-of-concepts, demos and abandoned projects. Non-techies vibe coding real products just isn't happening.
Can you guess which group of people ended up embracing CASE tools, visual programming, No-code and now AI code generators? That’s right! Those same expensive nerds. Those who look forward to arm wrestling the machine.
The productivity gains for software developers are off the charts. They can do more, faster. But even if the average developer were a hundred times more productive, it wouldn’t put a dent in the average product backlog. Companies will just build more, faster.
The barrier to entry for building your own app has never been lower. Yet most people have no interest in building apps. They never had. They prefer other, equally valuable contributions. That’s fine.
Software engineers write software to solve problems. As long as there are problems, their job is safe.
