I 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.
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.)
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.
I know you are not arguing from bad faith, but you are making an assumption along cultural lines, which is a mistake of missing the forest through the trees.
The vast majority of people (blanket statement, I know..) do not come from a culture where embracing curiosity, asking questions, or trying to break things down is the norm. Developers, tinkerers, etc., sure... you can reasonably make that assumption. But not everyone. A cultural practice of critical thinking and problem solving is HOW you KNOW to ask WHAT questions need to be answered FIRST, in order to solve a problem or progress toward a solution (if more information is needed).
You might even make the argument that everyone should have these skills, and I would agree with you. But the missing link here is a culture or cultural practice that provides those things (the WHY), and an AI/LLM will not provide those things in absentia, without "prompting", or build up that infrastructure in meatspace for a given set of users. Ignore this at your own risk.
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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.
> only thing that really changed is the initial query can be a mess of kinda nonsense
Little known fact maybe, but Google (also YouTube) search has been pretty great at this well before LLMs got really popular. I think it already started when they were changing from "keyword search" to "ask us a question search" but I'm not sure.
At some point I figured, if they want me to type a whole question, I might get even better answers if I ask the question like I was a complete idiot.
> https://www.google.com/search?q=pls+how+to+make+the+steam+pl...
> https://www.google.com/search?q=i+wnt+terminal+to+say+where+...
I don't think it actually gives better answers but it sure makes me grin every time
Sounds like OP’s friend was looking for a website, and your girlfriend was looking for a hobby.
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.
> 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.
To rice something must mean to customize and decorate. I'm guessing that it references the "rice rocket" term, originally a derogatory ethic slur. That term likely originated in the USA in the 70's or 80's, at first referring to Japanese motorcycles (which were fast, rightfully deserving the "rocket" designation: classic Japanese racing bikes are fully-fledged crotch rockets).
Sometime in the late 1990s, a Rice Rockets website appeared, making fun of people decorating their under-powered import econobox cars (not rockets in any sense) to look like racing cars with features like rear wings (on a front-wheel drive, lol), exhaust modifications ("fart cannons"), stripes, stickers, rims, steering wheels, etc.
If the cats decorating the desktop are Hello Kitty, she is really ricing it.
What does "fully riced with cats" mean?
I understand "ricing" to mean customising the appearance of a Linux machine, see e.g https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=month (SFW). So in this case I assume the UI has a cat theme or cat icons.
I think the etymology is from "rice burner" cars [0]:
> Riced out is an adjective denigrating a badly customized sports car, "usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
Rice stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements.
Race-inspired to look cool, but not actually functional. Picture putting one of those giant fake air intakes on the hood of your car.
Do you think "Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements" is the origin of "ricing" / "riced-out" or a backronym[1]?
Honest curiosity about language and language use.
In fairness and full disclosure: I have believed until now that the language comes from rice-burners and related, and I have never liked it. If I were still in communities that used it (unix desktop crowd), I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym
> I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.
Any negative connotations "rice burner" once had was lost when the term shifted towards referring to cars instead of humans. But now re-recognizing that the enhancements are inspired by the East Asian race turns the connotations back to humans. Isn't that a regression?
Nah, I remember back then, it was definitely intended to be derogatory to the cars, to asians, and to people who like the cars.
Yes, the term originated as derogatory slang towards the Asian population in the early 1900s, and its use towards them became especially popular during the Korean War. There is no question there. However, as before, the term evolved away from people and towards cars. You cannot be derogatory towards an inanimate object. It doesn't have a mechanism to internalize feedback. In that evolution, the term lost its derogatory connotations. The historical usage, while a part of our past, is used no more.
Reintroducing this to be something about a population's race reinstates the derogatoriness. You can be derogatory towards humans. Minimizing the cosmetic enhancements to be being inspired by the East Asian race and not valuable human achievement brings us right back to the same place we were when Japanese cars started being introduced into the North American market, diminishing the human contribution. It is a regression.
Old enough to watch this cycle from racism, to community, to memes, to racism, and now back to community
Damn you, Poe's law!
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.
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?
She did build a bot that saves cooking ideas with a schedule of dates for when to cook what. We have a lot of friends come over, and we cook various dishes for every occasion. Just a couple of days ago, I asked if she had a recipe for a dessert we tried earlier, and she said, "Yes, of course, let me just check that in the bot." The bot that runs locally and still helps with the end goal, makes me feel proud of her, even though that was an experiment she was aware of.