alt Hacker NewsThere 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.)
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for a lot of lower barrier to entry tinkering, for years i felt it was mostly just google a thing and follow directions. Feel like the only thing that really changed is the initial query can be a mess of kinda nonsense and still give you those nice directions, and you can instantly get clarity on a single direction if you get stuck.
So the barrier is still kinda there to just grab the instructions and follow them, its just incredibly easier to follow them.
You can get pretty dang far asking the AI to explain things and show you where it got that info, especially with IT/DEV stuff. Thing that has been very useful to me is specifically asking AI for that vocabulary. AI is suprisingly useful for giving a vague description of something you want and asking for possible words that match. But you have to KNOW to try that. A tinkerer might have started that convo with the chatbot by asking "What are web pages built from" "Can we use those building blocks to make our own simple app" and gotten there from a place of low expertise in web development but juicing out the knowlege from a place of low expertise is itself a skill.