Ask HN: Are AI dev tools lowering the barrier to entry for creating software?

I'd say not as of today's state of AI tools, but it's difficult to predict the future. So far, I can see many excited non-tech people who can build simple things or demos. But the real complexity starts behind that, once the solution needs to be deployed, maintained, extended with new features, bugs have to be fixed, etc. That's when it gets tricky.

I did a short experiment by trying to build an app with Cursor in the stack and domain I know nothing about. I got it to the first stage, and it was cool. But the app kept crashing once in a while with the memory issues, and my AI friend kept coming up with solutions that didn't help, but made the code more and more overengineered and harder to navigate. I'd feel sorry for those who'd need to maintain tools like this on stages like the one I described. Maybe that's the state of future start-ups out there?

Software engineering is going the way that Photography did. It didn’t happen overnight but in ten years it’ll be I’d bet. Good photographers are still needed when you need “real” work done, and those photographers use the tools available to them (photoshop et al).

But the common folk will be able to create pretty compelling software as easily as they can create pretty compelling photos at an extremely lower barrier of skill as compared to the 70’s and using film.

So, like with photography the jobs will be fewer and require more work and a higher bar of skill but also, the common person will be able to produce something pretty compelling knowing little to nothing about how it all works.

I don’t think it’s lower at all. If you try to build any remotely ambitious app with AI, you will easily find yourself in a very long abstract problem solving space that requires a good amount of creativity.

It’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time, designing ad hoc algorithms that mimic how we store and retrieve memory (and form context).

It’s gotten to the point where the simulation theory is palatable to me. How the simulation pulls in relevant context just in time is critical to making a believable experience. You can cut a lot of corners so long as the felt experience is believable (eg, the LLM can simulate a scenario with you without all the data necessary to provide a believable experience - this is a memory/context constraint that we are newly being introduced to with LLMs).

Ok, off the deep end, I know. But listen, it would be programmers that would catch wind of it first.

Thats a sombre take. My father in law was a professional photographer for 30 years. His experience was very much that everyone can take a decent photo today. But he saw diminishing opportunities as early as the days of small point and shoot cameras. Today, they're not used as much because commodity DSLRs are relatively cheap and dont require much if any training. Are we in the days of the Nikon Coolpix? Maybe, its definitely something to consider.

I was a JavaScript developer. I do something different now. The barrier to entry has always been too low and software jobs have always been filled with people that cannot program. There is absolutely no way AI will make that level of fraud any worse than it has been for at least the past two decades.