One of the great benefits of knowing software development is the ability to automate small tasks at work or in your personal life. You can create little scripts and tools that make your life and work a little better, without having to pay the subscription fee, if such that product even exists. This could be an elaborate finance spreadsheet to help your invoicing, a calculator widget for your website, or even a script that turns a big table into an orderly list you can paste into an email or a note.
It’s exciting to see a recent rapid advancement in the accessibility of this kind of automation for a much wider audience. Especially now, as Large Language Models can quickly prototype using prompts and immediately preview end results. Maggie Appleton aptly coined the term “barefoot developers,” drawing a parallel to China’s “barefoot doctors” who doubled life expectancy with basic medical care.
This new age of “Barefoot developers” could leverage this technology to build small, tailored pieces of software that might otherwise not have been created by the software industry. This could give people true ownership and agency over the development, without depending on business models or ad revenue that often constrain users in the long run.
My hope is that these new computing tools will stay accessible for the new wave of programmers, empowering people to create the software solutions they need in their own local contexts.
sources
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peterpeerdeman_maggie-appleton-activity-7263209809536020480-XVYN
links
- Large Language Models
- Tools for Conviviality
- Barefoot Developer
- [[Why Prompting is Hard#[41 24] The Rise of Personal Bot Development Programming for Everyone]]
- [[Why Prompting is Hard#[43 23] Excitement for non-programmers to have an outlet for computing]]
tools
- chatgpt.com
- claude.io
- cursor.ai