[marssaxman]

Lowering the amount of effort required to accomplish some task is a good thing. Giving more people the ability to meet their own needs is a significant form of technological advancement.

This was the whole point of Visual Basic, years ago: ordinary people could build their own software. I am glad to see the same sort of thing happening once again.

[pesus]

They are not really accomplishing anything, though. They're not actually building anything. Meeting their needs is one thing, but we don't need to pretend like they're overcoming some insurmountable obstacle.

Beyond that, an accomplishment ceases to be one if you don't actually do anything. It's not an accomplishment if I go buy a bag of chips and eat it, even if my hunger is sated a bit.

[hank9]

Gatekeeping is probably the wrong word here. But like, letting someone create a script that uses regex to parse some annoying forms they have to deal with in my totally made up hypothetical is a good thing.

While there's gratification in leaning how it all works, I don't think that should be a requirement to use a computer to do a task. And the smaller that wall the better IMHO.