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

#1

Post by joe8756438 » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

I am seeing more and more stories about people that don't know how to program are using AI to create software products. On a surface level, that suggests that the barrier to entry for software development is lower. But there are at least two new factors: cost of the tools and expectations in the market, which change the equation regarding what makes a product viable.

I'm curious about how the barrier to entry for creating software products has changed since the rapid proliferation of AI development tools.

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

#2

Post by duxup » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

I feel like AI can get your started with less friction, but after that you need background knowledge to vet everything that you need to learn ... by not using AI.

It's a dynamic I can't quite put a name on right now but I think that's a barrier.

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

#3

Post by simonhfrost » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

I'm sceptical that you can create entire apps. It might be good to get an MVP off the ground, but once you need to modify code it gets exponentially complicated because: 1) you're not familiar with the code AI wrote and 2) what it writes is generally more complicated.

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

#4

Post by dvngnt_ » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

I think for prototyping and helping people with some programming abilities yes. No code tools have existed for years, so the barrier was somewhat low to build basic applications.

I've had many friends with "app ideas" and using tools can help them flesh out their value proposition

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

#5

Post by 999900000999 » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

Not really.

Chat GPT and friends are really good at grunt work, but as far as picking the tech stack and architecting out an actual solution, it falls flat.

Plus if you ever run into any real trouble, chat GPT has a very nasty habit of just telling you to keep doing it the same way. I've had times where I'll post the same code in multiple LLMs and get multiple incorrect answers. All while I'm thinking if I was an actual web developer this would take 30 seconds...

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

#6

Post by dehrmann » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

The thing that's lowered it most in the last many years has been Roblox. What's raised it the most is the decline of desktop computing and the rise of app computing.

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

#7

Post by bko » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

dvngnt_ wrote: post #4

I think for prototyping and helping people with some programming abilities yes. No code tools have existed for years, so the barrier was somewhat low to build basic applications. I've had many friends with "app ideas" and using tools can help them flesh out their value proposition

Do any of them actually flesh out "app ideas" with AI?

I have the same type of friends and they would often ask me for help. But when you ask for even the minimal amount of work, they often just give up.

For instance, have an idea for an app? Draw out the screens. You can use a pen and paper. Where does this button take you?

AI can help with that sure, but its still a lot of work to go over and iterate with AI

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

#8

Post by boshalfoshal » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

I think the super played out twitter adage has some merit to it: "it makes 10x devs 100x devs."

Those who already have a high level idea of what to do and roughly how to execute it benefit the most from LLMs at the moment. This is very good for purely "technical" devs in greenfield environments. Less useful for super large interconnected codebases, but tools are getting there.

It will not, however, make a bad dev a good one magically. A bad software product is not usually bottlenecked by the software its running on, its bottlenecked by user experience and pmf. That still requires some skilled human input, but that could also change soon. Some people have better product intuition than others but couldn't execute on complex code, so LLMs do help here to an extent.

As of 2025, I think you still need to be a pretty decent dev even with LLM assistance.

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

#9

Post by sevensor » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

Every summer, my community pool has a cardboard regatta. Kids can use as much duct tape as they want to waterproof a cardboard box and paddle it 25 yards to the other side. Half of the vessels sink within a length or two and the kids have to swim to the edge of the pool. There’s no age limit, and last year a grown man entered a fully engineered catamaran design that beat all the others handily. The secret was using way more duct tape than anybody else.

AI dev tools are that catamaran. They’ll get you across the pool; you might even get half a mile from shore, but there you are, in the middle of the lake, sitting on cardboard and duct tape, wishing you knew how to swim.

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

#10

Post by zlagen » Tue, Feb 04, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

After using the AI chatbots for some time, I think that they are not so useful for non programmers other than for doing small tools, that may be difficult to modify and polish by a non programmer. But they still fail and have subtle errors too often so they are more useful for programmers which already know what the AI is doing and can spot mistakes.