[Scoundreller]

As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.

With about 5-10h over the weekend using free tier Claude and ChatGPT I managed to put together a scraper for a particular thing on a website I’m interested, grab the item images, do an initial pass with local OCR, if it hit some keywords, run openCV to crop for better OCR and dump the hits for further investigation.

Nothing particularly advanced but it would have taken me a horrendous amount of time without it to be half as good, like it did when I built a similar scraper 10 years ago.

Neither were very good code quality i’m sure.

[Viliam1234]

> As a mostly non-programmer it got me a lot done.

I guess this means that you have some good instincts or habits that would be good for a programmer, even if you didn't choose that path.

Programming is more than just knowing the syntax of the programming language and the APIs you want to use. It also requires clear communication and clear thinking, checking things, etc.

There is no reason why a non-programmer couldn't also think clearly or carefully. It's just a fact about humanity that most people don't; and many people have jobs that do not require this, so they never develop the skills. Some people develop them for job-unrelated reasons.

Now we are at the moment when the LLMs can do the syntax and APIs for you, but they still fail at clear thinking and proper caution. That elevates a good potential programmer to a good vibecoder.

[simplyluke]

This is broadly true of a bunch of jobs/fields with LLMs, but particularly true for programming. They raise the floor to a point where a generally capable person can put something like that together, or come up with a passably okay visual design, or decent-enough written language. I've been using them heavily to get some laughably basic CAD work done for small 3d printed projects. Stuff that absolutely makes my mechanical engineer friends roll their eyes at me.

An expert can either use the tool more effectively, or see all the issues in a less experienced person's output.

Both of these are good things, the mistake a ton of people are making is experiencing industrial scale Dunning-Kruger and thinking "Only my expertise is still valuable, every other white collar role is done!"

The second-order mistake is thinking that raising the floor like that devalues expertise instead of increasing demand for it. The net-effect of me starting to play with CAD because it's a little easier now isn't that I don't hire my friends who are experts to make a tiny spacer I'm going to 3d print, I never would have hired them for that, it's that maybe I start learning the skills and decide to take on a more ambitious project where I do need to hire one of them for some help, or start ordering custom CNC'd parts -- scale that to the entire economy.