alt Hacker NewsAs opposed to what?
If you ask a non-programmer to install Claude Code, just installing it will be a challenge, then opening the shell and interacting with it. Things as simple as copying and pasting can present roadblocks if you've never used a shell before, and things intuitive to programmers like using up-arrow to go back to a previous prompt would never occur to someone in the field.
Claude Code seems so simple and natural of a UI to programmers, it's easy to forget how much it builds on.
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Claude Cowork is the application aimed at non-developers that gives them a lot of the same functionality. My girlfriend uses it and has gotten quite far in producing her own software.
With Claude it's actually not that hard. I set up a system for a startup where devs used a full dev environment and non-devs could use the Claude web UI to open rougher PRs, and one of the non-devs asked me what was involved with getting a full dev environment set up, so Claude could iterate and he could test locally, which was faster than the "push to GitHub, use the Vercel/Supabase preview deployment" workflow he was using.
I gave him a link to Ghostty, a link to the claude code copy/paste pipe to bash thing, told him how to cd/ls/pwd into the folder he had locally from the GitHub app, and he was off to the races. I told him to type `claude` to open Claude Code in the terminal and gave him a prompt to use about being a non-dev getting his environment set up to the point of being able to pnpm dev and test, and Claude took it from there. The repo's readme had a setup section which it followed to install brew, asdf, pnpm, etc. With the GitHub MCP he's now opening PRs the same way devs do.
The terminal? No way, the normal Claude or ChatGPT desktop app.
Zoom out one step. The experiment should have been searching for "build website with AI", or "build website with <product name>", not "hey use this very specific UI to do something I know will fail"
(FWIW I think people betting their whole companies on AI are trusting shitty one-wish genie goblins, but the terrible irony is that anyone "technical" with years-old knowledge is talking about something else entirely in today's context)