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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Do your friend at least know what Claude Code (or any harness) is?

Of course she wouldn't be able to make a website if she doesn't even know the right tools to use. But I don't think it prove anything. Knowing and installing Claude Code might not be a common sense, but nor is it "expertise" or "skill."

I've seen in first hand that people struggle installing Steam. Yes, "people" in the plural. But just because some people struggle with it, it doesn't mean that installing Steam isn't an objectively easy task. Your friend's experience doesn't change the fact that building a website is something that an average person can do in hours if not minutes.

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Knowing what Claude Code is and why you might want it actually is domain knowledge which the op's friend does not have. Your idea of the average person might be biased if you work and socialise with people who have this kind of expertise.

I'm genuinely a bit floored reading the comments here, but I guess my idea of the average HN commenter's ability to talk to non-technical folks about technical topics is biased because I work and socialize with lots of people who don't have technical expertise (thankfully along with other technical folks who also have lots of experience talking to the former group). Many of them don't even know what Claude is, let alone Claude Code.

The average person does not even know what ChatGPT is and has not interacted with an LLM ever.

I don't think this is true. Certainly not in Britain.

I went to 3 weddings last summer and each one had a joke in a speech about using ChatGPT to write it and everyone laughed. 68yo father of the bride is a retired plumber and even he's cracking jokes about AI.

Yeah it's a true HN bubble moment. I've got non-technical people in my company (a tech company, where the majority of the employees are engineers) who have absolutely no idea what any of the agentic coding nonsense is, their only exposure to this stuff is Gemini in Google's office apps.

To them this is all just "AI" whether it comes from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google - hell they probably don't even know what an LLM is in the first place, yet alone which company provides what tooling. And these are people whose day-to-day involves talking to at least 1 dev a day, so you would imagine some of the knowledge would materialize via osmosis at the very least.

> Your idea of the average person might be biased if you work and socialise with people who have this kind of expertise.

I just said I've seen multiple people struggle installing Steam...

The point is that it's something objectively easy. Once they find (in this case, given by me) the correct instructions and follow through, they can easily do it by themselves again. It's quite different from what are traditionally considered "expertise": for example, even if you followed a master's painting process, stroke by stroke, tomorrow you still don't know how to paint.

Building common apps were more akin to "painting," now it's "installing Steam."

> The point is that it's something objectively easy. Once they find (in this case, given by me) the correct instructions and follow through, they can easily do it by themselves again.

This is true of most things in life. It is very easy to make compost, it is very easy to grow carrots, it is very easy to graft an apple tree onto rootstock, it's very easy to hang a door and it's also very easy to replace the break pads on your car.

Once you've done it, that is. And once you know what tools you need. And how to use those tools. And that you actually have those tools.

Codex, Zed, the like are all tools that you need to know exist and you need to have and you need to know how to use. It's the same thing as a wrench, a break bleeding kit, or some graft tape.

You are assuming that the hypothetical friend has been isolated from any kind of technology from the last few decades. The friend can, presumably, use search engines and the very same chip chipities to get the very rudimentary domain knowledge going.

I assume no such thing.

> I've seen in first hand that people struggle installing Steam. Yes, "people" in the plural. But just because some people struggle with it, it doesn't mean that installing Steam isn't an objectively easy task. Your friend's experience doesn't change the fact that building a website is something that an average person can do in hours if not minutes.

I think I would define "easy" with reference to the % of people who can do it. I don't know what that is for Steam, but there's a (now dated) survey of computer literacy in OECD that I keep coming back to in order to set expectations for what "average" looks like:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

You overestimate the average person

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