> it's about unleashing all the pent-up innovation from people who understand problems deeply but couldn't translate that understanding into software.
This is just a fantasy. People with "incredible ideas" and "pent-up innovation" also need incredible determination and motivation to make something happen. LLMs aren't going to magically help these people gain the energy and focus needed to pursue an idea to fruition. Coding is just a detail; it's not the key ingredient all these "locked out" people were missing.
A doctor has an idea. Great. Takes a lot more than a eureka moment to make it reality. Even if you had a magic machine that could turn it into the application you thought of. All of the iterations, testing with users, refining, telemetry, managing data, policies and compliance... it's a lot of work. Code is such a small part. Most doctors want to do doctor stuff.
We've had mind-blowing music production software available to the masses for decades now... not a significant shift in people lining up to be the musicians they always wanted to be but were held back by limited access to the tools to record their ideas.
This comment is wildly out of touch. The SMB owner can now generate some Python code. Great. Where do they deploy it? How do they deploy it? How do they update it? How do they handle disaster recovery? And so on and so forth.
LLMs accelerate only the easiest part of software engineering, writing greenfield code. The remaining 80% is left as an exercise to the reader.
A 50-year-old doctor who wants to build a specialized medical tool, a teacher who sees exactly what educational software should look like, a small business owner who knows their industry's pain points better than any developer. These people have been sitting on the sidelines because the barrier to entry was so high.
The "vibe coding" revolution isn't really about kids (though that's cute) - it's about unleashing all the pent-up innovation from people who understand problems deeply but couldn't translate that understanding into software.
It's like the web democratized publishing, or smartphones democratized photography. Suddenly expertise in the domain matters more than expertise in the tools.