I don't know. My personal take is that low-code/no-code tools should have ushered in an era of homemade software, but it didn't. It's something I think about a lot, incidentally. We've had the technology to make software using a GUI rather than a text editor for a <i>very</i> long time, and yet programmers still use text editors, and programming in general hasn't really been all that democratized. At best, it's now possible to create a website without knowing how to code, but it usually isn't a particularly good one.<p>A simple explanation is that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Edge cases and granular behavior are hard to capture except in granular snippets of code. I'm not convinced that LLMs necessarily solve this problem. Even if you are working with a theoretically quite competent LLM, there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourself. You could argue that this doesn't matter in the case of simple software, but I think we underestimate what people really expect out of something that's "simple", and I think we underestimate people's tendency to grow bored of old toys, especially if they don't work as expected.<p>If anything, my belief is that LLMs by themselves aren't necessarily going to make this a reality. You need an accessible and empowering UX/UI to go along with it. Otherwise, asking an LLM to build software for you probably won't be much of a fun experience aside from those who are AI enthusiasts foremost.<p>Side note, I have painful feelings about so many UX researchers I used to admire jumping on board the AI hype train so uncritically. I kind of get it, their job is to speculate on new possibilities a tech offers without getting too hung up on external complications. Still, I feel disillusioned. It seems that prior to all of this these same people were questioning our implicit assumptions with how we interact with computers in <i>really</i> interesting ways (in the same vein as Bret Victor). Now, their takes are starting to converge with that of the usual anonymous midwit AI enthusiast on Twitter who pivoted from crypto.<p>Put more bluntly, the idea that LLMs will usher in a golden age of people making simple software is kind of a boring speculative future, a speculative future shared and talked about by the most uninspired and boring people on Twitter.