alt Hacker NewsI ran a similar test and got completely different results. My girlfriend (hair stylist/artist) with zero coding background mentioned a Telegram bot idea. I asked "Why not build it yourself?" I gave her a Windows laptop, but she said she wanted what I have instead. So I handed her a USB stick and told her she was on her own now. Fast forward: she now runs Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced with cats. I only interfered on partitioning to preserve my data. She even installed Steam and got Portal running (that was her "watch this" flex after I told her not to even try). She pulled all of this off using a free-tier Gemini chat.
For the bot, a friend gave her a Kimi 2.7 key. She set up their harness and built a working bot in a matter of days. She even got a free Oracle VPS for deployment, though I stopped her there to check security first (still haven't had time, unfortunately). She uses that laptop daily now and says she enjoys it over Windows by a mile.
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Sounds like OP’s friend was looking for a website, and your girlfriend was looking for a hobby.
> Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced with cats
I think I lack the vocabulary to understand "fully riced with cats" in context here.
Desktop Linux has a deep and storied culture of real empowerment through learning and teaching. Even if you never sign up for a forum or hop into an IRC channel, that culture pervades a host of informal docs like the Arch wiki, and seems likely to get picked up by LLMs during training.
Maybe web development, despite plentiful tutorials, just isn't quite the same.
I needed a website and did the same. I would say it's a mixed bag to do it from the command line codex. It nailed generating the code but lots of stuff was annoyingly off. Any copy it wrote was terrible but using it to expand and refine my writing was helpful.
I would say we are very close to the end of things like WordPress and templated websites. It's pretty easy to make a custom page.
Damn you, Poe's law!
Speaking of flexing..
> mentioned a Telegram bot idea
> Fast forward: she now runs Arch Linux with Hyprland (I use Xorg/i3 though), fully riced with cats.
Did she end up building the bot or did the LLM just lead her down a desktop Linux rabbit hole?
There are big differences in what people call "tinkerers". Some are INTERESTED in building things, give it a little shot and find it to be daunting, and push it no further.
True tinkerers have no problem with this, because they enjoy learning how things work. Installing Linux, Steam, Portal are all relatively straightforward tasks for someone who uses computers on the regular - but to some people this is just something they've never done, are scared to do, or just don't want to learn. (Which is fine, but they'll never pick these agents up and run free.)
Barrier to entry used to be blog posts, documentation, watching poor quality Youtube videos of a thing that SEEMS related to what you're trying to do. Now we're getting that spoon fed to our particular case, so the friction is essentially just "follow the AI directives". (However, the depth of understanding probably struggles.)