As I wrote about yesterday, two weeks ago, I sat down and built my first ever web app using a combination of several no-code or low-code AI-native tools on the market today.

While this was all in all a very fast and fun process, one of my favorite parts was how it immediately also closed the loop on so many open threads in my mind that had felt like a "black box" around software development for the better part of the past 15 years.

1. "Push to prod" - This is the thing you do when you move the piece of software from your locally hosted environment to the live server. I knew that this happened in theory but had never experienced that closed loop myself. It turns out that it's pretty satisfying to "push code" live. (See: My two-year-old now tears through the apartment shouting "push to prod! push to prod!")

2. "Commenting out code" - Knew it was a thing, never understood this reference. Now I know it just means keeping a piece of code hidden behind comments so you can call back to it later but not necessarily use it in real time. I mean...duh.

3. Tabs vs. spaces - Look, I worked at Stack Overflow long enough to know this was once upon a time a hotly debated topic among the software community. But I never knew what the hell it meant until I used Cursor to build an app in Python last week. FWIW I've decided I'm on team tabs.

4. Branching - Again, understood the concept of creating a separate version of a piece of code or software, but never understood how individual code commits contribute to the complexity of branches in such a linear way.

5. Document storage - This one is hilarious, as I never really understood that coding largely involved setting up a system of document files organized in particular way. I now also understand why engineers I've worked with in the past get so intense about how they organize their Google Drives and Notion instances.

6. Being "plugged in" on focus time - Again, I could talk the talk all day long about why developers need private offices and quiet time to focus. But what I didn't realize is what was actually happening in those offices, which, essentially feels to me more like playing a video game where you try to beat a level, hit an error or crash code, then try again. This...explains a lot.

7. Code reviews - Earlier this week I happened to have a call with another engineer to get his advice about the way I was prompting the AI to achieve a certain output and then I offered, "Oh, let me just screenshare and show you on my text editor!" I opened up the app code and we looked through it together on my screen. Ohhhhhh... THAT is a code review.

8. Github issue tracking - I've used Github before so this one is less of a revelation than the others. But I did learn last week that if you already run your household in two week sprints, it’s surprisingly easy to start assigning GitHub issues to your partner…

If past precedent has taught me anything about my own behavior, it's that by the time I get around to learning something, that thing is already going out of vogue. Which means I've probably got about six months of being able to AI hack my way through this low-code world until the next suite of tools come out and upend the workflows once again.

My guess is in that next flavor of no-code tools, you won't even need the vocab anymore. You'll just need the vibes and the creativity.

So in a world where anyone can code, it begs the question: Are we all doomed? Or is this the start of a wildly creative coding revolution? Why not both?