Ask HN: Are AI dev tools lowering the barrier to entry for creating software?

38 points · joe8756438 · 12 days ago

I am seeing more and more stories about people that don't know how to program are using AI to create software products. On a surface level, that suggests that the barrier to entry for software development is lower. But there are at least two new factors: cost of the tools and expectations in the market, which change the equation regarding what makes a product viable.

I'm curious about how the barrier to entry for creating software products has changed since the rapid proliferation of AI development tools.


30 comments
sevensor · 12 days ago
Every summer, my community pool has a cardboard regatta. Kids can use as much duct tape as they want to waterproof a cardboard box and paddle it 25 yards to the other side. Half of the vessels sink within a length or two and the kids have to swim to the edge of the pool. There’s no age limit, and last year a grown man entered a fully engineered catamaran design that beat all the others handily. The secret was using way more duct tape than anybody else.

AI dev tools are that catamaran. They’ll get you across the pool; you might even get half a mile from shore, but there you are, in the middle of the lake, sitting on cardboard and duct tape, wishing you knew how to swim.

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boshalfoshal · 12 days ago
I think the super played out twitter adage has some merit to it: "it makes 10x devs 100x devs."

Those who already have a high level idea of what to do and roughly how to execute it benefit the most from LLMs at the moment. This is very good for purely "technical" devs in greenfield environments. Less useful for super large interconnected codebases, but tools are getting there.

It will not, however, make a bad dev a good one magically. A bad software product is not usually bottlenecked by the software its running on, its bottlenecked by user experience and pmf. That still requires some skilled human input, but that could also change soon. Some people have better product intuition than others but couldn't execute on complex code, so LLMs do help here to an extent.

As of 2025, I think you still need to be a pretty decent dev even with LLM assistance.

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joshstrange · 12 days ago
> I am seeing more and more stories about people that don't know how to program are using AI to create software products.

They are, in every case I've seen, creating software _demos_. Those things will fall over under their own weight with 1-2 more iterations.

Someone with no code experience can say "Make snake!" and for other contrived examples and maybe even add a handful of features but very quickly they will code themselves into a corner that they can't get out of. Heck, I sometimes go 3-4 prompts deep on something with Aider then git reset back once it turns out something isn't going to work out.

If some has _fully launched_ a product using only AI to write _all_ the code (Press X to doubt) then it's either a product that will never grow past its initial feature set and/or something trivially copied (with or without AI).

What AI tools may change is the ability for "ideas people" to create a basic MVP (Of the tool itself, I don't think you are going to get an LLM to churn out a whole SaaS codebase without a developer guiding) and raise interest/funding/recruit-others. That's not the "barrier to entry" lowering, that's just a "better slide deck".

zlagen · 12 days ago
After using the AI chatbots for some time, I think that they are not so useful for non programmers other than for doing small tools, that may be difficult to modify and polish by a non programmer. But they still fail and have subtle errors too often so they are more useful for programmers which already know what the AI is doing and can spot mistakes.
Bjorkbat · 12 days ago
Most of my observations have been that people are using it to make personal software. That is to say, software with an intended user base of just yourself and maybe friends and family.

For software meant to be consumed by the masses it's too unreliable for the all the boring details, but otherwise if you want something that serves a specific purpose then sure, it seems to work really well.

Otherwise though I haven't really hard of any non-technical founders leveraging it to finally get their app off the ground.