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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by mellosouls
  • 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.

    by greyb
  • 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.
    by xnx
  • 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.

    by gustavus
  • 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.

    by pjmlp
  • "Everyone is an engineer" sounds like something you hear right before a building collapses and kills 300 people
    by PostOnce
  • 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.

    by waterTanuki
  • 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.
    by jmchuster

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