Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough

Can you build small, tiny apps that can be genuinely useful? Absolutely, and I recommend it to everyone. I've been having great fun creating small apps, such as chess variant that makes the pieces obey gravity.

That said, this is not software engineering. It's tinkering, it's fun, and it can get you a foot in the door when it comes to approaching real work, but it's no way to build a business. As soon as the context window is not enough, you run into so many problems everything comes to a standstill. I don't think the article makes this distinction in any meaningful way, and the narrative is very quickly forming to say that we simply don't need any coders, any junior developers. This is false, and furthermore, this is dangerous.

Can you replace a junior with LLM? Probably, juniors are often a drag and a net minus. Should you do that? Absolutely not! You need midlevels, you need seniors, and both of those do not just magically appear. They need to be grown, taught, nurtured. We'll see the ripples of today's shortsighted thinking eventually.