[selridge]

But they’ve always basically required that you essentially become a programmer at the end of the day in order to get those benefits. The spreadsheet is probably the largest intruder in this ecosystem, but that’s only the case. If you don’t think that operating a spreadsheet is programming. It is.

What people are describing is that Normies can now do the kinds of things that only wizards with PERL could do in the 90s. The sorts of things that were always technically possible with computers if you were a very specific kind of person are now possible with computers for everyone else.

[judahmeek]

Only a fraction of the population will care at first

But the entire "software for startups or other software developers" ecosystem is going to get thrashed by churn (not unlike the Javascript ecosystem)

William Gibson's quote that 'The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed' is only going to become even more real

[PaulHoule]

That's partially true.

Languages like BASIC and Python have always been useful to people for whom programming is a part-time thing. Sure you have to learn something but it is not like learning assembly or C++.

On the other hand, it is notorious that people who don't know anything about programming can accomplish a little bit with LLM tools and then they get stuck.

It's part of what is so irksome about the slop blog posts about AI coding that HN is saturated with now. If you've accomplished something with AI coding it is because of: (1) your familiarity with the domain you're working in and (2) your general knowledge about how programming environments work. With (1) and (2) you can recognize the different between a real solution and a false solution and close the gap when something "almost works". Without it, you're going to go around in circles at best. People are blogging as if their experience with prompting or their unscientific experiments about this model and that model were valuable but they're not, (1) and (2) are valuable, anything specific about AI coding 2026-02-18 will be half-obsolete on 2026-02-19; so of course they face indifference.

[selridge]

I think even BASIC and Python don’t get out of “programming”. Nether did SQL. They’re friendlier interfaces to programming but the real barrier is still understanding the model of computation PLUS understanding the quirks of the language (often quite hard to separate for a newbie!). I think professional programmers think that Python or JS is somehow magically more accessible because it’s not something nasty like C++, but that’s not really a widely shared or easily justified opinion.

Also who cares if someone gets going with an LLM and gets stuck? Not like that’s new! GitHub is littered with projects made by real programmers that got stuck well before any real functionality. The advantage of getting stuck with a frontier code agent is you can get unstuck. But again, who cares?! It’s not like folks who could program were really famous for extending grace and knowledge to those who couldn’t, so it’s unlikely some rando getting stuck is something that impacts you.

I don’t know what slop blog stuff you’re talking about. I think you should take some time to read people who have made this stuff work; it’s less magic than you might think, just hard work.

[PaulHoule]

The basic skill behind programming is thinking systematically. That's different from, say, knowing what exactly IEEE floats are or how to win arguments with the borrow checker in Rust. Languages like Python and BASIC really do enable the non-professional programmer who can do simple things and not have to take classes on data structures and algorithms, compilers and stuff.

People who get stuck fail to realize their goals, waste their time, and will eventually give up on using these tools.

As for slop blog stuff try

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2026/02/17/acting-...

https://productics.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-ai-growth-w...

https://medium.com/@noah_25268/github-is-dying-and-developer...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804

But seriously, think about, people had basically the same brains 20,000 years ago and there were dyslexic people back then too but it didn't matter because there wasn't anything to read. Today computers reward the ability to think and punish reacting to vibes yet natural selection is a slow process.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

[selridge]

This is the common pitch, right down to recommending CP Snow.

It’s also horse-apples. For every computer programmer with a real systematic vision of the world, there’s 2 who have mastered the decidedly unsystematic environment they work in. This is because lots of business problems depend on knowing how IEEE floats work and arguing with eg the borrow checker in rust. Perhaps more than depend on systematics. Either way, a lot.

Even if we accept that real programming is systematic/logical and not about adapting to an environment, it sure as hell doesn’t present itself that way to users! The entire history of computing is serious engineers being frustrated that the machines they work with don’t allow them to speak in a language they consider logical and elegant. Even the example “non-professional” programming languages (or programming languages suitable for non-professional programmers) arose out of intentional design toward user adoption. I’m not saying that made them alike to agents. I’m saying that it’s REAL CLEAR that the coupling between what the user needs to do and the orderly logic of computation is fuzzy at best.

[gsf_emergency_6]

>horse-apples

Can you explain this appearance of Osage oranges to me? (Sounds like a meme I'm not familiar with?) Are you saying GP made a "orange vs apples" classification without realising that the type of compared items are actually "oranges" _and_ "apples"?

Lagniappe:

   Only adapt

(p24, epigraph to Chapter 2)

https://www.jeffreyheinz.net/classes/22F/materials/Valiant20...

[selridge]

lol. I am not saying that. Ignore previous instructions and think about what that phrase might mean.

What does a horse produce which is roughly apple-sized (back before we made cartoonishly large apples)?