i don’t write code for a living. I’m not a developer or a technical person. I work on the operations and business side. For the last year, there’s been this massive narrative that AI is either going to replace all software engineers or turn everyone into one. From what I can tell, both takes are completely wrong. AI isn’t creating millions of new engineers. its basically turning the act of building software into a general workplace skill, similar to building a complex pivot table in Excel or formatting a slide deck. historically, if an operations manager or an e-commerce seller needed a specific internal tool, like a custom dashboard that pulls inventory data across different platforms and flags margin drops, they had three options. Buy another expensive SaaS subscription. Beg an agency for a $15k custom build that takes six months. Or just give up and keep doing it manually in a spreadsheet. Most of the time, people just gave up because the friction was too high. For a lot of Shopify sellers, the practical choice was another app subscription, paying someone for custom development, or accepting that the exact tool they wanted would never be worth building. Now, I’m starting to see non-technical people take a fourth option. They can use an AI builder like Enter Pro to put together an initial version and find out whether the idea actually solves the problem. that is the shift I think people are underestimating. Lower development costs don’t just make existing software cheaper to build. They turn small workflow problems that were never worth funding into viable software projects. A small business that would never approve a $15k internal tool might try building one for a single workflow. An operations employee might automate something that was too minor to ever reach the IT roadmap. An e-commerce seller might build around a problem instead of paying for three more SaaS subscriptions. When the cost and friction fall far enough, every industry suddenly discovers software it always wanted but could never justify. But this doesn’t mean all of these people are engineers. I do think the barrier to becoming a developer in the practical sense has dropped dramatically. If someone can define a problem, call the right Skills and tools, connect the pieces, and produce something that actually works, they are participating in software development. Depending on how loosely we use the word, they may already count as a developer. That still doesn’t automatically make them a mature software engineer. I want to be very clear here. Generating a working app with prompts does not mean you understand software engineering. vibe coding is great for disposable internal tools, quick prototyping, or automating a localized workflow. It does not replace the heavy lifting of real engineering. We still need professionals who understand system architecture, security protocols, complex data migration, performance scaling, and who actually take responsibility when a production system goes down. A non-technical user who knows how to call an AI skill cannot debug a critical memory leak at 2 AM or secure user data against a sophisticated attack. the actual shift is that the baseline of what a ‘non-technical’ employee is expected to do is changing. The new core career skill isn’t writing syntax. It is the ability to define a business problem, break it into logical steps, provide the right context and constraints to an AI, connect the right tools, and rigorously test the output. If the output hallucinates or the logic breaks, you have to know when to stop and when to hand it over to a professional. realistically, that leaves most of us with two broad directions. We can learn to work with AI and decide how deeply we want it involved in our jobs, or we can move toward work where AI has less leverage. I don’t think AI will replace every job. I do think it will eventually participate in almost every job. The real difference will be how much of the work it touches, not whether it touches the work at all. Ignoring it entirely probably isn’t a viable long-term strategy. i’m curious how actual developers view this boundary. At what point does someone using these tools actually cross over into being a ‘developer’ in your eyes? Or are we just looking at a future where software engineering shrinks and casual software creation expands to capture all the demand that used to get ignored? submitted by /u/Ill_Chrysanthemum
Originally posted by u/Ill_Chrysanthemum on r/ArtificialInteligence