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.
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)
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.
No, but I bet this has a high likelihood of coming out in preliminary discussions.
What most likely happens is a normie has no idea of how to build something that does nothing first - they just start describing the end state.
I'm going to try this with my wife later today. I bet she'd sort something out since she's been a manager forever and phases out instructions maddeningly
Perhaps! But I do think the vocabulary issue is real and I think LLMs are still sycophantic enough that they won’t really challenge someone or offer alternative ideas on how to implement something unless they explicitly ask.
Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success.
The “hey guys, check out the website I built with Claude: http://localhost:3000/” joke is real!
In my experience, the whole “the terminal is a scary place” aspect is very real and some non-technical people can feel intimidated by.
I think Claude Code in the desktop app helps alleviate that a bit (perhaps Codex, too, but man what a mess the ‘ol ChatGPT app has become).
But I’m sure there are entire repos of web dev skills that someone could use to put together things with a bit of effort.
Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?
WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
Terminals are scary because it feels insurmountable. What are you supposed to do? If you just type “start python program” it gives you this absurd error that doesn’t make sense. What do you mean start is not in path?
The moment you interact with an LLM it gives you feedback that you’re doing things right. It feels like a gradual climb instead of a series of abrupt jumps. People really don’t like feeling like they don’t know what they’re doing, and the terminal constantly reminds you that you are making mistakes.
Yeah, if you're willing to put in that much effort.
I started on this path literally about as soon as I could read thanks to the family having bought a Commodore 64 for my older siblings, but also perfect timing in that when I got to this age the sibling whose room it was in had just gone off to university.
Most people are not like this, in much the same way that they're not going to read the T&C end-to-end (another thing I've done) or learn enough law to actually understand what those words mean (a step too far even for me).
I've had people criticise me for having had the opportunity to learn in that way, as they did not.
> You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?
No, why would I think that? I don't know them, the only thing I can say is in their favour: moving country to better your situation is difficult and them getting as far as they did is a demonstration of putting in a lot of effort of the exact type I praise by default.
> Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?
This is why it has the title (for me currently reading "What can I help with?" but this varies a lot) and the text box itself has the placeholder text "Ask anything". Sometimes I get big friendly suggestions about what to ask it, placed on screen near that text box.
> WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
I don't think it's constraints, per se: almost nobody looks at the font list and goes "oh no, too many options!"
Rather, GUIs are there to organise your options visually, group them in ways easy to intuitively get. There's a bit of fashion-induced rot here, e.g. I'm old enough to remember when it was always unambiguous when you were looking at a checkbox vs. a radio button, and now there's a blurry middle ground of collections of boxes with ticks in them that act mutually exclusive, but the point of a GUI from a UX POV is not the same as how software in general drifted as it got both more users and more developers and more opinionated managers and middle managers and designers who only cared about shiny rather than usability.
I am old enough to have observed non-tech workers using all kinds of text-based interfaces and it was a real pleasure seeing how old ma's would jiggle numbers on the bc-style TUI in the way that would offset any modern CompSci major.
Me too. But did you see them on their first day using it or their thousandth?
(Also you don't need to be that old. Less than 10 years ago I watched a doctor breeze through some clinical system while I was crawling along constantly referring to the manual)
What "democratized computing" was cheaper computing and VisiCalc, not WIMP and GUI?
But again, VisiCalc is intentionally limited, it's not a all-powerful environment, on purpose. It's all about intentional limitations, making computation easier to reason about.
Not really, for making a single-file anything ex nihilo. I suppose the chat window won't be able to run a linter or make and run tests as a typical "eager" agent might, so maybe it will make more mistakes.
Almost all web chatbot providers have code sandboxes that they will run (limited) tooling for you. If you ask for it, it will run deterministic linters, formatters, format converters, tests for you. Older versions of Claude would for example happily try to reverse engineer entire artifacts for you, once you provide a URL.
As 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.
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)
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.
I got my girlfriend to install Claude Code and she was happily able to create software with it completely independently of me.
The terminal? No way, the normal Claude or ChatGPT desktop app.
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.
Open any chat window and ask for a simple SPA with startup instructions. It's fine, it's fine, it works.
And you think a random John/Jane Doe knows what a SPA is?
No, but I bet this has a high likelihood of coming out in preliminary discussions.
What most likely happens is a normie has no idea of how to build something that does nothing first - they just start describing the end state.
I'm going to try this with my wife later today. I bet she'd sort something out since she's been a manager forever and phases out instructions maddeningly
Yeah I wonder if they had given their friend Claude code or Codex, would it have been more likely to create what she wanted?
Perhaps! But I do think the vocabulary issue is real and I think LLMs are still sycophantic enough that they won’t really challenge someone or offer alternative ideas on how to implement something unless they explicitly ask.
Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success.
The “hey guys, check out the website I built with Claude: http://localhost:3000/” joke is real!
In my experience, the whole “the terminal is a scary place” aspect is very real and some non-technical people can feel intimidated by.
I think Claude Code in the desktop app helps alleviate that a bit (perhaps Codex, too, but man what a mess the ‘ol ChatGPT app has become).
But I’m sure there are entire repos of web dev skills that someone could use to put together things with a bit of effort.
> the terminal is a scary place
Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?
WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
Terminals are scary because it feels insurmountable. What are you supposed to do? If you just type “start python program” it gives you this absurd error that doesn’t make sense. What do you mean start is not in path?
The moment you interact with an LLM it gives you feedback that you’re doing things right. It feels like a gradual climb instead of a series of abrupt jumps. People really don’t like feeling like they don’t know what they’re doing, and the terminal constantly reminds you that you are making mistakes.
Scary but then liberating once you get to know what you have to type in to reach your objective.
Yeah, if you're willing to put in that much effort.
I started on this path literally about as soon as I could read thanks to the family having bought a Commodore 64 for my older siblings, but also perfect timing in that when I got to this age the sibling whose room it was in had just gone off to university.
Most people are not like this, in much the same way that they're not going to read the T&C end-to-end (another thing I've done) or learn enough law to actually understand what those words mean (a step too far even for me).
What an ode to exceptionalism /s
You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?
> What an ode to exceptionalism
I've had people criticise me for having had the opportunity to learn in that way, as they did not.
> You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?
No, why would I think that? I don't know them, the only thing I can say is in their favour: moving country to better your situation is difficult and them getting as far as they did is a demonstration of putting in a lot of effort of the exact type I praise by default.
> Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?
This is why it has the title (for me currently reading "What can I help with?" but this varies a lot) and the text box itself has the placeholder text "Ask anything". Sometimes I get big friendly suggestions about what to ask it, placed on screen near that text box.
> WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.
I don't think it's constraints, per se: almost nobody looks at the font list and goes "oh no, too many options!"
Rather, GUIs are there to organise your options visually, group them in ways easy to intuitively get. There's a bit of fashion-induced rot here, e.g. I'm old enough to remember when it was always unambiguous when you were looking at a checkbox vs. a radio button, and now there's a blurry middle ground of collections of boxes with ticks in them that act mutually exclusive, but the point of a GUI from a UX POV is not the same as how software in general drifted as it got both more users and more developers and more opinionated managers and middle managers and designers who only cared about shiny rather than usability.
I am old enough to have observed non-tech workers using all kinds of text-based interfaces and it was a real pleasure seeing how old ma's would jiggle numbers on the bc-style TUI in the way that would offset any modern CompSci major.
Me too. But did you see them on their first day using it or their thousandth?
(Also you don't need to be that old. Less than 10 years ago I watched a doctor breeze through some clinical system while I was crawling along constantly referring to the manual)
> WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering
Are you kidding? WIMP and GUI democratized computing!
What "democratized computing" was cheaper computing and VisiCalc, not WIMP and GUI?
But again, VisiCalc is intentionally limited, it's not a all-powerful environment, on purpose. It's all about intentional limitations, making computation easier to reason about.
To put it more bluntly. Computer usage would be low if limited to terminal interactions and there’s no GUI.
Democracy clearly disempowered the monarchs. :)
It did!
Not really, for making a single-file anything ex nihilo. I suppose the chat window won't be able to run a linter or make and run tests as a typical "eager" agent might, so maybe it will make more mistakes.
Almost all web chatbot providers have code sandboxes that they will run (limited) tooling for you. If you ask for it, it will run deterministic linters, formatters, format converters, tests for you. Older versions of Claude would for example happily try to reverse engineer entire artifacts for you, once you provide a URL.