I’ve always been a tinkerer and a hacker, and I love building things. Unfortunately, I’m not a developer (even though I know the basics of JavaScript and Python), so I’m often stuck in my tracks by my lack of skill to fully build or prototype the ideas I have. It’s either too complex or too time-consuming.
For the last year or two, I’ve used LLMs and generative AI tools to prototype and validate early concepts. My stack is pretty simple: I chat with Claude (using Artifacts) or ChatGPT, edit existing code with Cursor, or go further by building full-fledged web apps with platforms like Bolt.new and Lovable.
Andrej Karpathy sums it up the best:
It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
I also like how Geoffrey Huntley describes the impact on those of us working in SaaS and development:
People with ideas+unique-insight can get concepts to market in rapid time and be less dependent on needing others expertise as the worlds knowledge is now in the palms of everyone’s hands.
Technologists are still required, perhaps it’s the ideas guys/gals who should be concerned as software engineers now have a path to bootstrap a concept in every white collar industry (recruiting, law, finance, finance, accounting, et al) at breakneck speed without having to find co-founders.
(…)
If you’re a high agency person, there’s never been a better time to be alive…
While I see myself as an idea guy who can just do things, I still wouldn’t feel comfortable shipping all of this to production without some oversight or feedback from someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
Source: ghuntley.com (via Simon Willison)