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".
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.
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.
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.