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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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This clickbait headline has been making the rounds for a few days now. Replit's CEO is not saying that AI has "replaced" professional coders, he's talking about their company's target market.
It's like a website provider making tools to simplify website creation for small businesses so that any mom-and-pop store can have a basic website, and saying "we're not aiming these tools at professional website authors." They're simply not trying to occupy that niche.
Those apps have their place. Why shouldn't an "unskilled" person be able to make some little tool that does some specific task they need done? I'm a professional coder and I make "shitty little apps" all the time for throwaway tasks. I think it'll be empowering for the average user to be able to do that sort of thing too.
Obviously, don't go buying such apps and installing them on your own phone or whatever. That's where professionals still have their place.
The problem isn't that they're going to use it for themselves. The problem is they're going to either try to make money with it or do some black hat shit that this will help facilitate.
(Also, saying to us that it's obvious not to buy it doesn't really matter considering the huge number of people out there with smartphones and no idea how any of it works.)
And then they will fail at it, because that's not what these tools are for. I don't see why this is a problem.
If someone is asking you "hey, I want to use this Replit thing to build a competitor to Amazon, I have an MBA so I'm sure I can do it. Want to invest?" Then by all means try to talk them down off the ledge or make sure you're far enough away to not be in the splash zone.
But this is someone saying "I want to make tools that non-experts can use to do productive things." I think it's not fair or reasonable to oppose that. Making computers more accessible and generally useful to the public is a good thing.