Ask HN: What happens when "everyone" codes?

3 points by carimura ↗ HN
In the before times, roughly 2-3% of workforce probably wrote code in some capacity. What happens when this goes to 50%?

9 comments

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Same as for surgeons.
Same as for surgeons.

Do you mean when people buy robots that can be loaded with an unrestricted model that permits it to perform surgery at home? I could envision people trying to bring back dangerous old methods of anesthesia such as using Henbane given it can be found in abundance.

I think of it like:

  everyone :: deals          everyone :: scripts, tools, small apps
  lawyer   :: contracts           swe :: high value software
People do informal deals all the time, work off loose understandings, fire off standard forms etc.

When there are disputes (incidents), lots of money and risk involved, that's where you want a lawyer. I think SWE will stick around as a craft but I genuinely don't know if it will be more or less valuable.

I don't think everyone wants to code. I think a lot of people never think of developing and wouldn't even if it was easy. Some people always wanted to develop and couldn't, for whatever reason, and now more or less can to some capacity. How many people today even use PCs for recreational purposes?
it's already happening, I believe. I think of it in two ways:

the optimistic one is that more people can build something of their own and some of them will get properly interested in how technology works.

the pessimistic one is that a lot of bad products come out, bad user experience, security and privacy are forgotten, and people can't really tell the difference between a good product and slop.

but maybe over time (after a lot of bad stuff happened) people will be able to tell the difference. it will take some time