Particularly with something static, I don’t think they’d fail to get a result.

But without domain knowledge I think they’d misunderstand prototype with finished product.

Without knowing what it’s doing, it’s hard to know what it’s not doing.

Apps ain’t static.

The files you serve to the browser are static, not the contents of the page itself

Updating the dom can happen with only individual assets, so it’s a static site

for example you can service static sites from S3 that have HTML/CSS/JS but no API or DB

Minesweeper is an app right? Unit conversion? Color palette designer? Metronome?

Anyway I'm not so sure "static" is a viable boundary between app and not app. A static page that does any sort of API request doesn't suddenly become an app imo.

However for some reason it had him deploy a single HTML file with all the assets encoded as a huge base64 blob in the code that required a massive amount of JavaScript to extract and render.

I often ask it export a single html file, for an external collaborator or simpler sharing. But I wouldn’t deploy that to production.

I wonder if they asked it to deploy a html file.

But this is exactly the kind of hidden domain knowledge / expertise that changes how you use the tool.

Welcome to Software Development, Lindsey from HR - here's your first database!

People just don't really understand how these things work yet, and they don't know what to ask for, I'm hopeful that they eventually do become more tech-literate, but not sure yet.

I reminds me old WYSIWYG and unlike Figma it has full HTML/CSS capabilities available.

How I work with it:

- I ask agent to extract part of app into Design, let it even use playwright-cli to get full rendering of the particular view.

- perform design session in Design.

- once design system is perfected I go down to Claude Code dungeons, do /design-sync.

- perform on the stack implementation session.

Actually you don't need Claude Design UI for any of that too. Just ask any coding agent to prepare local mock HTMLs and iterate over them.

We don’t use react, which Claude design seems to trend towards. We use Phoenix / liveview.

We have a shared design system, which keeps the visual elements in line. And then just prototype on design, collab, discuss and arrive at what we want to ship. And then engineering take over and rebuild via hand / claude code.

But the tools aren’t directly connected.

The value has been in the separation. In iterating on the prototype without impacting the codebase, dev cycle, etc. And solving problems/unknowns earlier.

There were always tools for this, but Claude design just feels more accessible and therefore gets used more immediately.

And the fidelity of the outcome (and the assumptions it’s forced the make) are more valuable and faster to achieve than Figma.

I vibe coded an iOS conference schedule app recently, built on top of my own rust UI framework. I started with claude design. I gave it the requirements, and showed it screenshots of other conference schedule apps I like which have features I want to use. I also gave it some visual references for how I want the app styled. It came up with some workable designs. They were a bit 'webby'. But, fine. The high level breakdown of UI screens and navigation between them was excellent.

Then I gave all the HTML files it produced to claude code, along with the documentation for my UI framework and told it to port the code to my UI framework. The first working version was rough. It copied a lot of the unintentional webby look and feel. It worked around missing features in my UI framework by rolling its own janky reimplementations of platform features. For example, instead of using UINavigationController, it rolled its own. It made its own (kinda bad) tab based navigation bar. The app didn't work properly in dark mode, because it was hard-coding a lot of colours. It took a bit of back and forth to fix all of this stuff. But I'm really happy with it now. It looks and feels great.

It's just a pity I couldn't share the app at the conference. Apple took a few days to approve the app in Testflight, and by the time they approved it, the conference was over.

I assume everyone else is playing with the same AI tools that I am, and getting similar results. But a lot of people I talk to seem to have no idea that this is possible right now. They're amazed when I show them my schedule app.

If you ask a non-programmer to install Claude Code, just installing it will be a challenge, then opening the shell and interacting with it. Things as simple as copying and pasting can present roadblocks if you've never used a shell before, and things intuitive to programmers like using up-arrow to go back to a previous prompt would never occur to someone in the field.

Claude Code seems so simple and natural of a UI to programmers, it's easy to forget how much it builds on.

(FWIW I think people betting their whole companies on AI are trusting shitty one-wish genie goblins, but the terrible irony is that anyone "technical" with years-old knowledge is talking about something else entirely in today's context)

I gave him a link to Ghostty, a link to the claude code copy/paste pipe to bash thing, told him how to cd/ls/pwd into the folder he had locally from the GitHub app, and he was off to the races. I told him to type `claude` to open Claude Code in the terminal and gave him a prompt to use about being a non-dev getting his environment set up to the point of being able to pnpm dev and test, and Claude took it from there. The repo's readme had a setup section which it followed to install brew, asdf, pnpm, etc. With the GitHub MCP he's now opening PRs the same way devs do.

What most likely happens is a normie has no idea of how to build something that does nothing first - they just start describing the end state.

I'm going to try this with my wife later today. I bet she'd sort something out since she's been a manager forever and phases out instructions maddeningly

Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success.

The “hey guys, check out the website I built with Claude: http://localhost:3000/” joke is real!

In my experience, the whole “the terminal is a scary place” aspect is very real and some non-technical people can feel intimidated by.

I think Claude Code in the desktop app helps alleviate that a bit (perhaps Codex, too, but man what a mess the ‘ol ChatGPT app has become).

But I’m sure there are entire repos of web dev skills that someone could use to put together things with a bit of effort.

Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?

WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.

The moment you interact with an LLM it gives you feedback that you’re doing things right. It feels like a gradual climb instead of a series of abrupt jumps. People really don’t like feeling like they don’t know what they’re doing, and the terminal constantly reminds you that you are making mistakes.

I started on this path literally about as soon as I could read thanks to the family having bought a Commodore 64 for my older siblings, but also perfect timing in that when I got to this age the sibling whose room it was in had just gone off to university.

Most people are not like this, in much the same way that they're not going to read the T&C end-to-end (another thing I've done) or learn enough law to actually understand what those words mean (a step too far even for me).

You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?

I've had people criticise me for having had the opportunity to learn in that way, as they did not.

> You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?

No, why would I think that? I don't know them, the only thing I can say is in their favour: moving country to better your situation is difficult and them getting as far as they did is a demonstration of putting in a lot of effort of the exact type I praise by default.

Are you kidding? WIMP and GUI democratized computing!

But again, VisiCalc is intentionally limited, it's not a all-powerful environment, on purpose. It's all about intentional limitations, making computation easier to reason about.

(Also you don't need to be that old. Less than 10 years ago I watched a doctor breeze through some clinical system while I was crawling along constantly referring to the manual)

This is why it has the title (for me currently reading "What can I help with?" but this varies a lot) and the text box itself has the placeholder text "Ask anything". Sometimes I get big friendly suggestions about what to ask it, placed on screen near that text box.

> WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.

I don't think it's constraints, per se: almost nobody looks at the font list and goes "oh no, too many options!"

Rather, GUIs are there to organise your options visually, group them in ways easy to intuitively get. There's a bit of fashion-induced rot here, e.g. I'm old enough to remember when it was always unambiguous when you were looking at a checkbox vs. a radio button, and now there's a blurry middle ground of collections of boxes with ticks in them that act mutually exclusive, but the point of a GUI from a UX POV is not the same as how software in general drifted as it got both more users and more developers and more opinionated managers and middle managers and designers who only cared about shiny rather than usability.

A web app was produced with lots of mock "Hi i'm Dominique and i love running through fields and having a bucking good time" type entries complete with silly horse photos. A huge amount of drunken fun even if it boiled a towns water supply and blew through half a subscription to create.

I was looking at the results as a dev with 30 years experience and thinking fuck me. The little apps i made here and there before AI are being outdone by a bunch of drunk people on a whim!

Yes, but the premise of the article is you should be able to outdo a bunch of drunk people with your 30 years experience, if you use AI too.

2025 called and wants its test back

Your friend could start with telling the LLM that they are a non technical person who wants to make an app and it will explain all the successive steps.

Have we? Or is this just something that people say now, without citation?

I personally know of two completely vibe-coded large apps in my professional environment. One by a non-technical manager, made to solve his needs, then sold to customers. Initial development went along great, but by now velocity has greatly slowed down. Also took a lot of engineering hours (of actual software developers) to get permission management from "chaotic and ineffective" to passable. It's still worse than what you would have gotten by just using a couple sentences of the right technical language at the start. Deployment is also a bit of a nightmare. All in all, anything beyond the first rollout phase was delayed by months. Honestly it should have stayed as a prototype that then gets rebuilt from the ground up. But still, it is a real app, making real revenue

The other example was vibe-coded by a software engineer in his free time. Works pretty well, doesn't have too many bugs. Makes some revenue, but a lot less. Solving manager problems just sells better.

And that’s a natural process for many products. In the journey from discovery to prototype to MVP to product, it should be rebuilt multiple times.

Particularly with LLM’s to assist, the process of rebuilding from a new context and understanding of the desired goal requires even less effort.

The hardest part is managing any real users, their expectations, and any data / workflows they’ve come to require from what came before.

But as another software engineer, I remove myself from that comparison, because the idea is to find out if a non technical person can do the same, that's the definition of vibe coding.

... or IDs apps as cr*p is still seen as negative.

So there's that.

He can't exactly release it because he uses a lot of copyrighted stuff. It's also meant only for himself. Though, I've been asking if I can play it, it looks fun.

We're in this spot where we don't know when to cut our losses on projects like this. (Is it even viable as production software? Does it currrently do what it's supposed to, or are they adding new features? Is there a return on continued development efforts?)

None of these apps they have built are seeing any major usage, and I don't think a single one is what I would call "done" (There was a gold rush stage at the beginning of 2026 where senior leadership wanted everyone to spend some time messing around with Claude). Unfortunately, they never told anyone when to stop messing around with Claude, so the ROI is ever diminishing.

Plinq was made on Lovable, https://www.aieatingtheworld.com/articles/non-technical-foun...

Couple more on https://buildthedamnthing.com/resources/articles/case-studie...

That seems like something that could be done using an llm, not that complicated probably.

And maybe, in other fields as well.

What harness did you use?

In e.g. claude, there are two modes:

1. Spit out code 2. Draft a plan, ask questions, GOTO 1

You literally have to go out of your way to get it NOT to write code. I keep mine on a tight-ish leash because it modify code way too happily even when there's no intention or instruction to do so

I don't think this is using an agent harness.

They are either using some generic web frontend, ala chatgpt, some local app like claude desktop, or programming app like cursor.

Each of those will detect that you are "building an app" and will spit out code in one form or another. You have to try really hard and be very explicit that you want the output in some other format than code.

That’s why the question only makes sense if it was relayed to the laywoman, in this case.

As for a coding harness, I prefer the term agentic coding.

It all boils down to naming things and cache invalidation, /s

I am doing perfectly fine with the web UI version of these tools... They seem to also not make tokens dissappear as fast as using claude cli tool to automate implementations. Makes my work day more tolerable as well as I actually have something to do over waiting until some implementation can be read through...

None of this is related to intelligence, desire or potential. It's about context and experience. The vast majority of people use their computers as consumption devices, like a TV. If I asked you to "make a movie" where would you start?

I let her do all of it without influencing her choices. She choose the web interface of ChatGPT because she already had an account and that's the tool she was familiar with.

While I agree with you it is not an optimal choice, web chatgpt can solve the problem. I just asked it now to do it (in my own words) and it spit out the code in one go.

Of course she wouldn't be able to make a website if she doesn't even know the right tools to use. But I don't think it prove anything. Knowing and installing Claude Code might not be a common sense, but nor is it "expertise" or "skill."

I've seen in first hand that people struggle installing Steam. Yes, "people" in the plural. But just because some people struggle with it, it doesn't mean that installing Steam isn't an objectively easy task. Your friend's experience doesn't change the fact that building a website is something that an average person can do in hours if not minutes.

I just said I've seen multiple people struggle installing Steam...

The point is that it's something objectively easy. Once they find (in this case, given by me) the correct instructions and follow through, they can easily do it by themselves again. It's quite different from what are traditionally considered "expertise": for example, even if you followed a master's painting process, stroke by stroke, tomorrow you still don't know how to paint.

Building common apps were more akin to "painting," now it's "installing Steam."

This is true of most things in life. It is very easy to make compost, it is very easy to grow carrots, it is very easy to graft an apple tree onto rootstock, it's very easy to hang a door and it's also very easy to replace the break pads on your car.

Once you've done it, that is. And once you know what tools you need. And how to use those tools. And that you actually have those tools.

Codex, Zed, the like are all tools that you need to know exist and you need to have and you need to know how to use. It's the same thing as a wrench, a break bleeding kit, or some graft tape.

I went to 3 weddings last summer and each one had a joke in a speech about using ChatGPT to write it and everyone laughed. 68yo father of the bride is a retired plumber and even he's cracking jokes about AI.

To them this is all just "AI" whether it comes from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google - hell they probably don't even know what an LLM is in the first place, yet alone which company provides what tooling. And these are people whose day-to-day involves talking to at least 1 dev a day, so you would imagine some of the knowledge would materialize via osmosis at the very least.

I think I would define "easy" with reference to the % of people who can do it. I don't know what that is for Steam, but there's a (now dated) survey of computer literacy in OECD that I keep coming back to in order to set expectations for what "average" looks like:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

His words were: It feels as if I need to know how to program it.

I was expecting he could say something like "Oh, it seems like you don't remember the people I'm referring to, perhaps you need some kind of CRM system. Can you investigate if there are any easily available CRM systems you can interface with, so we don't need to make one for you?"

Whereas my OpenClaw moment was trying to make it manage its own NixOS installation, so that if I ask it to do something, it doesn't yolo `apt install` commands, but rather improves on the same overview of its own installation.

A lot of people had success making their OpenClaw do things without being Linux experts. But you need a tinkerer's mindset, is what I came to conclude.

My experience with friends has been the opposite. A PM friend made a custom tool. A friend who has never written a line of computer code has an app.

If you tell Claude Code "I want a website that does X, Y, and Z" it will write code.

"Make me a kanban board for construction tasks. I want you to walk me through the process of hosting it" worked for me.

worse, the longer an LLM conversation goes on, but especially with constricted/free models (yes the simple chat interface they are likely using) the harder it is to get an LLM into this mode even *IF* you know the right words to say

at that point the best way forward is to terminate the exchange entirely, and to start off with the right initial message, instantly getting into coding mode. a non technical person will not know this and be stuck in feature theory crafting mode in perpetuity, or worse in an endless "excuses' mode as the LLM diverts ant attempt at coding into reasons why its not going to: "i wont output incomplete/broken code! that would require too many lines of code sorry i wont do it! i wont be able to get it perfect so i wont attempt it! but heres more features and theory crafting"

will a non technical person know to end the conversation and start fresh? not likely unless they have a lot of experience already with LLMs

Remember the LLM is not a human employee. You don't have to say "yes and" to whatever crap they produced so as to not hurt their feelings or infringe upon their creative autonomy, nor do you have to defend the correctness of your original instructions so that they don't think less of you for asking them to chase the wrong goose.

I probably generate 20-50 lines of code for every 1 line that I keep.

This is also why I think harnesses and things like Claude Code and OpenCode are false efficiency. The only way I can maintain my pace of branched trial-and-error is by using claude.ai/chat and manually extricating code fragments to and from my codebase. The human is still the best harness for production-level code.

That’s been the way I do it.

I suppose that it will be considered “quaint,” soon enough, but I have found it to be effective.

I think it’s valuable enough to justify the price, and I want it to use the better model, as much as possible.

I started using harnesses because they are good for when something breaks and it's not trivial to investigate so I'll have the agent tell me what's happening, then using that to produce my own change

"update an AGENTS file with relevant information"

To be able to navigate that faster on longer tasks. Meanwhile, the lay person does not even conceive of the LLM as a file reading entity. To them, its machinations are its own, so these types of "dumb" (simple) solutions are not even on the deck of cards.

> Whereas to me who knows the terminology would have probably just taken a single exchange of messages to get the result she described to me. I would have prompted with something like “Please write to me an html page which does X, Y, Z.” But since she didn’t know the right terminology she got into a vortex of feature discusion, and she didn’t find a way to tip the AI into “just do it, write it now” mode.

Even as a developer, when I've been using the web chat interface for things which I know the AI can do easily, I've had this happen to me a few times. I was very surprised the first time I saw ChatGPT respond ~"this would be a few thousand tokens, I can't do that".

Even more surprising: ChatGPT was accurate when responding that way this time, despite this being trivial for Claude and well within what ChatGPT could do using the web chat interface 6 months earlier. The ChatGPT output was extremely meh.

the output is programmed to look correct so unless you have some sort of background you won't actually know what errors to look for.

Not only does it look correct, it looks correct with an extremely Subject Matter Expert degree of authority. Often I'll work with an LLM, and it simply just misses so many things. I've worked in all sorts of different domains, software, chemistry, material design, everything from power generation through to physics, and in each and every case I see it missing incredibly important things. Any true subject matter expert would immediately bring up and prompt concerns, but not the LLM.

This makes sense, of course, because these are language models. They were trained on language. Their first and foremost capability is language.

An LLM's true expertise, true subject matter expertness is language.

And so anyone working with LLMs who isn't already highly skilled in the field they're asking questions about, will invariably be led astray and miss extremely important parts of a puzzle that need to be solved.

Right now there's just so much value in building LLM tools for experts that everyone is focusing on that. But surely at some point we'll have bespoke harnesses that exist exactly to solve this kind of thing.

I think this can start with constrained problem spaces like "you are a WordPress developer, you solve problems for people with enough expertise to know they are looking for a WordPress developer" and incrementally expand from there. Maybe I'm naive but I think you can probably get pretty far with this today just by writing loads of skills and picking the right technical preferences to encode in them.

I think people are better helped by using those services than going a level lower and using LLMs directly.

Being able to create a basically coherent, polished looking image is what you’d get on Fiverr for a few bucks. Mostly hustlers filling in templates, or people that know the tools but never learned design fundamentals.

Actually being a competent professional: Knowing how to visually communicate showing information hierarchy, what purely visual aspects of an image say, how different things read differently among people who might see it— e.g. does an image of an apple communicate fancy computer? teachers/school? Nutrition? Food? Produce?, etc etc etc (Good kerning and type usage, composition, gestalt, etc all come with that for free. Many think that is the point — those are tools someone can wield to do good design, they aren’t themselves good design.)

These tools let amateurs do what the fiverr crowd used to do. Unfortunately, the fiverr crowd is now being pushed into doing what entry-level new graduate professionals used to do, and the job market is kind of fucked.

This is the target user of these chatbots.

For the bot, a friend gave her a Kimi 2.7 key. She set up their harness and built a working bot in a matter of days. She even got a free Oracle VPS for deployment, though I stopped her there to check security first (still haven't had time, unfortunately). She uses that laptop daily now and says she enjoys it over Windows by a mile.

True tinkerers have no problem with this, because they enjoy learning how things work. Installing Linux, Steam, Portal are all relatively straightforward tasks for someone who uses computers on the regular - but to some people this is just something they've never done, are scared to do, or just don't want to learn. (Which is fine, but they'll never pick these agents up and run free.)

Barrier to entry used to be blog posts, documentation, watching poor quality Youtube videos of a thing that SEEMS related to what you're trying to do. Now we're getting that spoon fed to our particular case, so the friction is essentially just "follow the AI directives". (However, the depth of understanding probably struggles.)

The vast majority of people (blanket statement, I know..) do not come from a culture where embracing curiosity, asking questions, or trying to break things down is the norm. Developers, tinkerers, etc., sure... you can reasonably make that assumption. But not everyone. A cultural practice of critical thinking and problem solving is HOW you KNOW to ask WHAT questions need to be answered FIRST, in order to solve a problem or progress toward a solution (if more information is needed).

You might even make the argument that everyone should have these skills, and I would agree with you. But the missing link here is a culture or cultural practice that provides those things (the WHY), and an AI/LLM will not provide those things in absentia, without "prompting", or build up that infrastructure in meatspace for a given set of users. Ignore this at your own risk.

So the barrier is still kinda there to just grab the instructions and follow them, its just incredibly easier to follow them.

Little known fact maybe, but Google (also YouTube) search has been pretty great at this well before LLMs got really popular. I think it already started when they were changing from "keyword search" to "ask us a question search" but I'm not sure.

At some point I figured, if they want me to type a whole question, I might get even better answers if I ask the question like I was a complete idiot.

> https://www.google.com/search?q=pls+how+to+make+the+steam+pl...

> https://www.google.com/search?q=i+wnt+terminal+to+say+where+...

I don't think it actually gives better answers but it sure makes me grin every time

I think the etymology is from "rice burner" cars [0]:

> Riced out is an adjective denigrating a badly customized sports car, "usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Race-inspired to look cool, but not actually functional. Picture putting one of those giant fake air intakes on the hood of your car.

Honest curiosity about language and language use.

In fairness and full disclosure: I have believed until now that the language comes from rice-burners and related, and I have never liked it. If I were still in communities that used it (unix desktop crowd), I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

Any negative connotations "rice burner" once had was lost when the term shifted towards referring to cars instead of humans. But now re-recognizing that the enhancements are inspired by the East Asian race turns the connotations back to humans. Isn't that a regression?

Reintroducing this to be something about a population's race reinstates the derogatoriness. You can be derogatory towards humans. Minimizing the cosmetic enhancements to be being inspired by the East Asian race and not valuable human achievement brings us right back to the same place we were when Japanese cars started being introduced into the North American market, diminishing the human contribution. It is a regression.

Maybe web development, despite plentiful tutorials, just isn't quite the same.

> Fast forward: she now runs Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced with cats.

Did she end up building the bot or did the LLM just lead her down a desktop Linux rabbit hole?

I would say we are very close to the end of things like WordPress and templated websites. It's pretty easy to make a custom page.

I think I lack the vocabulary to understand "fully riced with cats" in context here.

Sometime in the late 1990s, a Rice Rockets website appeared, making fun of people decorating their under-powered import econobox cars (not rockets in any sense) to look like racing cars with features like rear wings (on a front-wheel drive, lol), exhaust modifications ("fart cannons"), stripes, stickers, rims, steering wheels, etc.

If the cats decorating the desktop are Hello Kitty, she is really ricing it.

Your friend needed an agent, not a chatbot. I use Claude within VS Code (as per many others) but I certainly wouldn't recommend that for a beginner. They needed a tool that's specifically aimed at people who want to build software but don't know the first thing about how to do it. I think there are a bunch of these now but the one I'm most aware of is Lovable, and I'm pretty surprised you didn't recommend one of these.

An HR person I know was searching for a way get something build, found Lovable, and managed to build a somewhat functional application with it on their first attempt within an hour or two. It was full of holes and far from perfect but they got something working - at least the outline of a potential solution.

As I say, you should have recommended your friend to try building with a tool like that: a tool that they're a member of the target market for. They would have got a lot further. I'm not vouching for the quality of the result, but they would have got something.

Even for experiened engineers, chatbots have always been a pretty grim experience for software development: from the mind-numbing drudgery of endlessly copying and pasting code, commands, and prompts around, to the fact that they just can't see enough of what you're doing to generate the best quality output or advice. You can do software development with a ChatBot but it seriously sucks, and better tools are (a) probably being shoved at you day in, day out via ads, and (b) only a Google search or a ChatGPT recommendation away.

(Obviously, nobody's going to search for "Lovable" without knowing about Lovable, but they might search, or ask ChatGPT or whatever, something like, "How would I build a website without knowing anything about building websites?", which might get them an advert or recommendation.)

1. The layperson was able to to steer the session(-s) into full PM/PO mode ideating, refining and explaining features and ideas.

2. The user was the sycophant in this relationship, never steering the session(-s) into producing something tangible.

The premise supposes that somehow the session(-s) never even tangentially touched implementation/deployment ideas and the user has never typed something like "that's enough, how to make this appear in my browser?". While not impossible, the user must have been proactively co-operating (say sidetracked) on not achieving the stated goal.

It just is not believable or interesting. Even if it did happen, the reality is it just doesn't matter.

It could also be that you've seen a lot of social media memes regarding "cope", observed their ability to provoke strong emotions, and confused this for meaningful insight. I see a lot of AI commentary these days that is clearly being spread for its virality rather than its truth value.

What i described is what happened. I don’t appreciate the undertones where you are insinuating that i’m lying for whatever reason.

> The layperson was able to to steer the session(-s) into full PM/PO mode ideating, refining and explaining features and ideas

You call it steering. I would call it falling into that grove. Probably tiny things in the initial message made the first response more likely to be a clarifying/ideating type. And once that happened the conversation was gaining momentum in that direction and neither participant was trying to guide it in a different one.

> the user must have been proactively co-operating (say sidetracked) on not achieving the stated goal.

Exactly. The LLM itself sidetracked her. They were just talking about cool features they could add, and at no point did she put down her feet and say “stop asking more questions and just write the code”.

It can be a combination of many things. Attitude (some people hate to be rude, and not answering a question feels a bit rude). It can also be that she enjoyed the process of unpacking and elaborating on the idea.

The meaning of the story is not that no lay person can possibly develop using AI. That would be silly, and untrue. I know clear counter examples. The point is that if you don’t know what you don’t know it is harder to steer the AI in the direction you could very easily with the right lingo.

This is not a wrong tool, wrong job issue. The issue is that people think any moron can use an LLM and get professional results.

My HR friend found Lovable off her own bat. I imagine she probably Googled or asked ChatGPT something like, "How do I build a website to do BLAH without knowing anything about building websites?"

The point is people talk, they ask questions, they Google, they talk to ChatGPT, and if they have a problem to solve they're often quite motivated to find a solution to that problem off their own backs.

If someone asks me for advice on how to get something built then I'm going to recommend a tool that suits them and their situation, whatever that may be. In this specific situation, if they know nothing about building software, I'm certainly not going to sit them down and have them try to follow the most jank-ass way imaginable of building software with an LLM when I know much better tools exist that are built with people like them in mind.

Seriously, what is with the overly narrow assumptions in the replies I'm getting this morning? You're the third person who's tried to set this same fraying paper tiger on me. Can we all just wake up and think about the issues a bit more in the round, please?

You are not wrong, just that was not the intent of what the person was trying to test for.

edit: Lovable is a web app too, not an agent.

I feel as though the gap between the theoretical power of LLMs and what the average user knows of them and their capability have already widened so far that it’s irreconcilable.

Is this an actually serious question? Am I losing my mind here?

I didn't tell my HR friend about Lovable: she found it on her own. Of course someone's not going to Google for Lovable if they've never heard of it, but they might Google for "how do I build a website without knowing anything about it?", or ask ChatGPT the same question.

They're also, most likely, getting endless ads for AI services that help you build various kinds of software shoved into their faces all the time - these ads may not couch the value ad in exactly these terms, but that's fundamentally what they're advertising.

Not everybody is like this but there are plenty of people in the world who, when they have a problem, are quite motivated to find ways to solve it off their own backs.

Yes, it is. I just Googled that exact question (and I promise I'm not trying to be obstinate when I say I'm Googling the exact phrase!) and it's automated AI response was to use WiX or Squarespace. Prompting it further with "What if I want it to do bespoke things that Squarespace can't do?" it responded with using Figma to design the website UI and then pass it along to either Framer or a "professional developer".

I do genuinely think that this is a discoverability issue. Of course, if you prompt it further with "Could I use AI to do this?" it dutifully responds that it can help with generating HTML, but that's three layers of difficulty to eventually get whatever default model Gemini has for signed-out Google searches to even suggest HTML.

Chatgpt can absolutely do the things here: it can give you files, it can integrate and show web pages that you develop, etc.

There is no need for an "agent", the chat version works just fine and is actually easier for novices.

But that is not how our education system aligns us. One typical example of problem solving kids, and I too, learn in school is how to apply a concept in physics to a free-body-diagram(Indian and Chinese education cram schools are famously good at teaching kids how to do this, the usefulness of which I debate). But it all stops at the exam room. No architect or jr structural engineer position for you kiddo.

Another kind of problem solving skill might be how to invest money and understand your own risk appetite to construct portfolios to manage your money. All that is taught in school is a dry compound interest formulae, time discounted cash flows and a black scholes model. Only to find out later I don't need most of it to manage my money.

I also noticed a friend of mine had way more success by having Claude write code by doing TDD and giving Claude scenarios for things the code should be able to handle, if you do this correctly, and cover edge cases, Claude will work with these in mind.

Buddy sent me a share link and he was just like “dude this is crazy I just told it what I wanted and it just spit it out in a few minutes”. No “experiment” needed he just did it because he knew Claude could do it and it worked exactly like you’d expect. Hell, he did it on the Free tier.

https://www.feldmanmolly.com/chiwork2024-author-version.pdf

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Could-You-Explain-Programmi...

'him: Keywords? Variables? ...

me: (Explaining what programming actually is)

him: Oh, I thought I would write something like: "Create football stadium and football players. Start the game when user presses spacebar. Make players have red shirts and white socks."'

The output is EXTREMELY misleading, as all the data here lives purely locally, yet the AI says that you can "just share the link" and other people will see the schedule you set on the generated artifact. Also, what link? To the Claude chat? It doesn't explain what to do with that `Booking` artifact other than "link to it".

I can so easily see someone tapping out a few steps down the line of this once they realize it doesn't work and they have no clue what to do or say to make it work. What do you even ask as a non-technical person at this point? I guess they could explain "The other person doesn't see it", but would the AI actually clarify that it's because it's not fucking hosted anywhere and has no mechanism of persisting the data outside of the current machine, or would it - as I'm almost 100% sure would be the case - not actually point out this error?

[0] https://claude.ai/share/0cbfe698-3886-4d4d-86e4-7c697b61dc00

That is exactly the key or the sign there. Even with a couple of decades of engineering expertise, when I try to do / research something that I don't know enough about, I find myself in the exact position of not having the vocabulary.

To the point that I sometimes have to ask the AI "nicely" to cut the pleasantries and be ruthless against nonsense, whether from its/their side or from mine.

But there's also some psychology in play too; that we (engineers) see a lot: Some people just let their imagination run away and forget to "do"; without someone in the conversation pushing for results and action, the conversation will just stay within imagination and everyone will be happy in the moment but nothing will get done.

Why did she even need that?

> “Please write to me an html page which does X, Y, Z.” But since she didn’t know the right terminology

No code there!

I had the exact same realization using Claude Design. It’s great that "anyone can design" now, but I don't have the domain knowledge to describe what a good design consists of. I know it when I see it, but that is far from enough.