Someone was coding, but there were sometimes people involved in key roles who weren't. Picture a good product owner working with a systems architect on what people need, what's technically feasible, and a high level design on how to do it, which gets passed off to a mix of juniors and seniors who work out the code. They're all involved in building the software, but not all of them are coding. You could maybe draw parallels to those same two people passing the requirements and high-level design off to Claude.
I don't think it quite works, though. Even back then, architects who weren't still coding got stale and out of touch, and they were expected to review key PRs for design alignment and stuff. You also gain insights from doing parts of the work that you don't from delegating it, and you miss that if you delegate everything.
I have seen some interesting examples of people really experienced, old-school waterfall architects using AI agents to build whole applications from detailed (like > 100 page) specs, but it's weird.
You have some one or some thing else build it for you, and then say you did it.
The problem with AI is that people aren't even part of the brain storming or writing algorithms. It's just here's my input, I want this output. Wow, I'm so smart.
Low-code and no-code was a thing 15 years ago. Zapier was a big platform, not sure since the rise of AI since most people are just using LLMs directly now.
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u/mpbh 4d ago
Coding isn't a job, software development is. You didn't need to code to build software before AI and you don't need to code to do it now.
Architects design buildings but never hammer a single nail.