I've been saying that computers are just now getting out of their beta period. I hope that we continue to recognize that any computer you can't freely program is not really yours.

Yes, this is the shift software developers are going to really have to get used to.

People all have access to a ton of computer hardware which is capable of remarkable things.

Historically they have been restricted in what problems they can actually bring that hardware to bear on by the availability of software tailored to their specific need.

LLMs are capable of unleashing the power of your computer hardware to do all sorts of things you never would have been able to consider before.

They've been possible the whole time in software designed for the user, it's just that the business world will do everything in its power to undermine the user's control to protect their business model. The primary barrier is not the difficulty of writing some drivers for a piece of hardware, it's the intentional barriers that the mfg puts in your way so that that is harder to do -- lack of docs, obfuscation, various kinds of drm. A win is a win, but the same will happen in this new world. The barriers will just have to be built a bit higher until most users give up.

One of the things about the AI hype train that really got me was how many of the stories of wonderment were about the things that have always been trivial on a computer if you actually use it for computing instead of just running somebody else's proprietary magical spell. Obviously it's capable of nontrivial things, but I heard so many stories of like "I would have had to manually rename 100 files to a different naming convention, but claude wrote a 20-line python script in 30 seconds that did it write away" and you hear what the renaming was and instantly know how to do it in one trivial line of bash. In other words, stories about it doing things that computers have always been good at, that have been taken away from you by the notion that computers are for begging the avatar of a corporation to work some magic.

Which points to the UX barrier of the average user to write that line of bash.

That’s the magic; the barrier is down.

The ux barrier is in your mind, man. This is what I'm saying.

Really, the ux barrier is how much "free" time you have to devote to training your mind to overcome the ux barrier. While many of us live and breathe this kind of abstraction, the "average" person does not want to learn a new kind of mental gymnastics to accomplish everyday tasks.

You can study for a lifetime to become Yen Sid and teach the broom to fetch water for you without lifting a finger, or you can just fetch the dang water yourself in 10 minutes.

See also: Tourists, Bears, and Trashcans

Claude (or whatever bloated proprietary software you are using it to circumvent) is the magic broom, notwithstanding the fact that you weren't the one teaching it. bash is fetching the dang water yourself. We're not talking about inventing novel algorithms here, or writing some masterpiece of code that will always guess your intention correctly. Back before mass-marketed consumer software, plenty of regular people made it work without a computer science degree or a particular genius.