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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been thinking about this question for months: with access to good LLMs and unlimited tokens, how many non developers will end up making software?

I’m sure some people will. But most people I know don’t think about software like that. They don’t know what use cases are, or ask themselves how their life could be simpler with different software. LLMs only make software if you prompt them. Most people don’t frame the problems they have in life as “I’m missing software to solve problem X”.

I think most people will never prompt LLMs to write software. Just like I don’t have a 3d printer, because I don’t think about how problems in my life could be solved with little plastic doodads.

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My analogy is: almost everyone can to go Home Depot and grab all the plumbing supplies they need to do a lot of jobs. And people do - Home Depot does great business.

But plumbers are still in very high demand, and charge really high prices for what is in many cases really simple stuff.

For a lot of folks, the idea just never enters their mind that they can solve simple problems themselves. Most people don’t want to spend the time, undertake the learning, have the possibility of doing it wrong, risk their property, insurance/code issues, etc. And this is an absolutely reasonable position to take! We can’t all be specialists at all things.

All that to say: people will long think that software is something that is made by someone of a special role. Even long after that’s not necessary anymore. That’s not great job security, but it’s what I’m going with for now!

I've met at least one person that has gone pretty far on a somewhat complicated project who has literally zero programming experience. he did it for fun.

I also know someone that thought about making a SaaS for his specific niche he works in, he asked me if I ever used Claude then told me his project.

Yes, most people will never do it because they're not the type of people that are self-motivated and courageous enough to dive into something with confidence to see how it goes.

But probably, as more people build stuff and it makes headlines that X person built Y service and is making Z$$ per month and he can't even write a hello world to save his life, a lot more people will try it out.

> Yes, most people will never do it because they're not the type of people that are self-motivated and courageous enough to dive into something with confidence to see how it goes

Or they’re just not interested. Just look around to see how many things that people are doing that you have no interest into. That’s the same disinterest people have towards programming and sys admin.

> X person built Y service and is making Z$$

If person X didn’t contribute anything but a prompt, he probably wont be able to charge much.

A non programmer can iterate on an idea just as well as a programmer.

First guy I mentioned spent a month tinkering, testing what he could, getting a basic high level understanding of the problem space to understand why his prompts didn't work, etc

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