The Itch Problem
AI is a great on-ramp. You still have to want to go somewhere.
I wrote something recently that I keep coming back to. Not because I regret it, but the cynic in me won’t let a question this optimistic just sit there.
The question isn’t “is this worth building?” anymore. It’s just “would this be helpful?”
I keep wondering what happens when it’s not just developers asking that question - when the teacher, small business owner, the hobbyist with zero coding background gets there too.
I wanted that to be true and I still do. But wanting it raised a harder question: has anything like this ever actually worked?
The promise is the same but the packaging has changed. No-code was going to let everyone build software. YouTube was going to make everyone a handyman, a mechanic, a home chef. Now AI agents are going to democratize coding. Each time the assumption is the same: the barrier was access and now we’ve solved access.
But access was never the barrier.
No-code didn’t deliver not because the tools were bad but because most people don’t wake up wanting to build solutions. They wake up wanting problems to go away. Those are very different things. The itch to decompose a problem, deeply understand it, model it, and construct a fix is not a skill gap, it’s a disposition. You can’t instill a disposition with a better user experience.
YouTube proved this unintentionally. You can learn to do almost anything from your couch if you find the right channels. More people can now handle a leaky faucet or patch drywall but contractors remain booked out months ahead and the trades aren’t exactly struggling. While YouTube raised the floor slightly, the moment a fix reveals a bigger problem underneath, the video gets paused and the phone comes out. Access to information never moved the ceiling because information was never what was missing.
The parallel to AI coding is almost exact. I can imagine a world where AI handles the equivalent of “leaky faucet” software problems - simple automations, one-off tools, basic scripts. Maybe that happens. But real software problems, like real home repair problems, tend to be more complicated than they first appeared. And at that moment you need judgment, not a better tool.
This is the uncomfortable truth about automation - it doesn’t lower the skill requirement, it raises it. Autopilot didn’t make flying accessible to non-pilots. It made piloting more cognitively demanding because now you need enough mastery to know when the automation is wrong and how to take over when it fails. AI coding tools are likely the same. They’re a force multiplier for people who already think in systems. For everyone else, they’re autopilot controls with no pilot behind them.
So software engineering isn’t going anywhere. The job might look different - more directing, less typing - but the underlying skill of knowing what to build, why and how to tell when it’s broken is not getting automated away. It’s getting more important.
The people who will genuinely benefit from AI coding tools are probably the same people who were already a little bit in the direction of building things. The curious hobbyist who always bounced off the learning curve. The person with the itch but not the stamina or time for the old on-ramp. That’s a real population worth being excited about, it’s just not everyone. It was never going to be everyone.
Think about the woodworker who goes full time. They didn’t get there because YouTube lowered the barrier to entry. They got there because they already had the obsession, YouTube just helped them go deeper and faster. The tool served the itch, it didn’t create it.
The same is true for the developer who bootstraps a product using AI. AI didn’t give them the entrepreneurial drive or the systems thinking. It compressed the timeline between “I have an idea” and “I have a working thing.” The itch was already there.
So when the teacher or small business owner or the hobbyist with zero coding background does get there it won’t be because AI handed them a new capability. It’ll be because they already had an itch and AI gave them an on-ramp that didn’t dead-end on them.
That’s still worth being excited about, it’s just a smaller and more honest version of the dream.