The Citizen Developer

asj1786

Yes comrade, we are all equalizing for three people to become multi-trillionaires. The level of propaganda reaches Maoist proportions.

netsharc

Ah yeah, if I ask a company to design and build me a bridge, I'm a bridge engineer!

camgunz

Anyone can buy a table saw. Doesn't make you a carpenter and it doesn't mean you can/should build anything.

pjmlp

Yeah, right. That usually requires a 3 to 5 year degree, and possibly professional exam. Having the AI do the work doesn't make one an engineer. Just like one doesn't become a writer by owning a typewriter or a word processor.

gustavus

COBOL Visual Basic Low-Code Power Platform Although AI substantially changes the situation the hard part of being an engineer was never the code. A technician is defined by the tools they work with, an engineer is defined by the problems they can solve. Taking a dozen different business processes and stakeholders and figuring out how to actually solve the problems they have is engineering.

jauntywundrkind

Hack the planet! There's lots of caveats asterisks & limitations, sure sure sure: we hear you Technically Correct repliers, here to spread your Well Actually naysayings. But at the end of the day: heck yes. So much heck yes. Even if you are not engineering well, just the ability to have your agent go in and do reconissance of systems. "Reverse engineer this Bluetooth protocol for my device" or what I'm doing now, "reverse engineer my epaper display controller"... People have an incredibly powerful tool for assessing the world, for finding out. And I for one strongly believe that will beget the great virous circle of lovely lovely fucking around. A wheel that is humanity's best invention, best motivation, best traction, best side, and one that any self proclaimed Hacker if any spirit ought be out of their seats cheering raving with excitement happy for.

jmchuster

My criteria is very simple, could you handwrite the code if you needed to. Could you write this code without the LLM writing it for you. Could you write this code without the IDE auto-completing it for you. You could take it all the way to, could you write the assembly if you needed to. Of course, the complexity of the ask and the timeline has to be commensurate with the power of your tooling at each level.

greyb

I've noticed a near 1:1 overlap of people who advocate against shadow development, and people experiencing status anxiety about the fact that AI has proven that they barely pass the bar. Some arguments about shadow development and IT are valid, like security and who takes ownership after the original developers leave, but they don't really account for the reality that organizations expand constantly, business needs are perpetually exploding and most development shops are so mired in business requirements and bureaucracy that there's genuinely no value involved with interacting with them.

fleischhauf

is it going to be like YouTube, where everyone was a video artist suddenly?

yahway

Including software developers. Mathematicians tops unless the touch something outside code. An engine is literally multiple disciplines in one. I tired of SDs thinking they are engineers without touching hardware.

wccrawford

I've been using Claude to plan out some personal projects, and at first it seems like it can do anything ! But as I've used it, I've noticed that it overcomplicates everything and often even forgets what it previously said, and makes decisions that contradict it. The AIs need a firm guiding hand, like a lead developer would give junior and mid-level programmers, and even occasionally to a senior developer that went off the rails for personal obsessions. For instance, I was just trying to have it make a simple shopping list app. I had Claude take my old shopping info from the Google Keep list we use (it keeps the old checked-off items) and get the latest grocery ad, and produce a list of suggestions. It was amazing! I decided I want to send that info to a server, have a checklist there, and then keep the info for later so the AI could do it again. After a lot of questioning (via Matt Pocock's skills, which are great) it was so complicated I finally yelled at it for overcomplicating everything, and told it how simple I wanted it to be, again. It kept insisting on IDs for products, IDs for stores, IDs for store sections... Even after I told it no IDs. I finally said it a few more times in different ways. It's finally getting back to the simple webapp that I imagined. It needed a lot of handholding to get it there. And it's the kind of thing I would see from devs that were inflexible and had to see things a certain way. I'm not ruling out that it could eventually get over this phase, but I have a feeling it'll always be something that needs handling. My other project right now was naturally complex, and needed a lot of that stuff, and things have been going better, but I still correct it rather a lot, even on things I'd previously told it.

PostOnce

"Everyone is an engineer" sounds like something you hear right before a building collapses and kills 300 people

blueboo

A rising tide lifts all boats. It doesn’t mean the sea is made of boats

xnx

Good. IT broadly and unnecessarily adopted the complexity of mega-sites that serve hundreds of millions of users even when their actual user base was in the hundreds. AI allows competent and detail-oriented people with technical knowledge to again create useful internal tools in hours or day instead of the "never" timeline from gatekeeping developers.

metal13

Found this post super interesting. I've personally run into similar, and built a really lightweight k8s operator and claude skill that lets the citizen devs deploy to an eng/IT managed internal k8s cluster. Keeps things safe (non-public), and can update it as they get more advanced.

mellosouls

Ooooh, a blast from the past from me in a discussion about No Code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034221 I was very anti it then - it was clearly Consultancy BS; but now non-devs really do have much more scope to create things that were only possible by software engineers before - and yes that creates challenges for us professionals. But I no longer sneer at "The Citizen Developer" as an idea; its time has come.

waterTanuki

New person in sales joined my company a few months ago and on the very first introduction they handed me a vibe coded app and asked me to review it for them and put it into production. Haven't spoken to them since. They haven't proposed anything else since then either to engineering. You may think it harsh but they didn't even ask my name, what my specialization was, etc. Engineering to these folks is a one-and-done endeavour. You just prompt and fire it off and ride off into the sunset, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. They never see the work that goes on after the launch party. The midnight debugging sessions, the database migrations, the DNS failures, debates over which auth provider to use, the list goes on. Until the "citizen developer" is willing to engage in the less "sexy" part of software engineering, the world will move on without them as well.