One of the most fascinating aspects of the AI-assisted programming that seems to be prevalent these days is the lowered barrier for entry. It used to be that we'd have these grand ideas like, oh, "let's create an app to help me practice my guitar scales1," and we'd have to factor in how much time we thought we had to commit to the idea.
That time was the cost of the app. If we thought it'd be a week, we'd consider that time and the experience of having done it - and wonder if it was worth the effort. We'd then hunt for an equivalent, maybe find one2, and use that instead - and we'd forget all about doing our own.
The AI-assisted coding arc has changed this. Now, we can go from a seed idea to a working implementation in a few hours, perhaps; maybe it's not perfect, but it actually fulfills the requirements we had well enough that it can serve as a platform around which we can build better features, or more of them.
We're seeing a drastically lowered barrier for entry. In some ways, that's terrible - sometimes ideas are rejected because they're just not that good, like an app to sort drumsticks by size...
But sometimes those ideas are rejected because they're too grand. AI is allowing people to fulfill their ideas much faster, with a far lower barrier to creation, than there used to be, just like 3D printers are enabling makers to create things to fill niches in their spaces that otherwise would have been too difficult to master.
This is a new wave of hobbyist enablement - and just like with remote control planes and drones, and free compilers, the enablement of hobbyists is giving us new avenues for a vision of professionalism, avenues we'd have been unable to imagine before they became commonplace.
There's still a lot of room for things to go sideways, of course, and there are the downsides created by a flood of half-created and poorly-conceived apps with giant security holes from poor or incomplete specifications. It's not like we don't still need to take care, and know what we're doing - but there's also a lot of room to discover what a wonderful, creative world we live in. Go, create. Make things happen.