The point I am making tho is some of these tools are being marketed to non tech folks but they still are not that accessible for the vast majority of people from a UX standpoint
Yes how ironic that the tool apparently designed to decimate software development careers can only be weilded by actual software developers. Thanks for this clarifying demonstration. The AI hype pushers are out of their minds.
I agree completely! I tried to use Claude Code to scrape a daily crossword puzzle from a website and automatically printing it out on my local printer. I do this manually now and wanted to automate the process. I used Claude LLM as a guide to each step. (Claude said this was a perfect application for Claude Code)
Used up all my tokens the first day with very little progress. And far from doing all the coding with very little interface by me, I had to hover by my terminal to approve the “OK to proceed” requests from CC every 3-5 minutes. I complained to Claude who eventually admitted this wasn’t a very good application of CC and that since I wasn’t familiar with coding that Claude Code was not an appropriate tool for my use.
At least now I know I’m not missing out in anything!
There's "Context Dumping" where its a person having a conversation with LLM's and evolving their ideas. Nothing wrong with this approach if you also follow the primary sources too.
There is agentic which is a design pattern for scaling business needs using LLM's as non-deterministic workers. For the most part they do a good job in this setup, but sometimes more expensive than just writing code like a normal human first.
It's not a "this way or that way". You can find what works for you. That's what's neat about it. The models. Croissant ML. Hugging Face. Lots of good stuff you can dive into and not be captured by the token economy with off the shelf PC hardware.
I have finally gotten around to using Claude Code and am loving the ability to use natural language to edit my website's theme files, but as I was using I was having the same thoughts as you: if you don't already know code or have a background in how software functions it's not going to do much more than a standard chatbot.
He mentions “You might be wondering: why not just have OpenClaw install its own skills and tools? It can absolutely do that, and I use it that way frequently. But just as often, I use Claude Code as the background architect of my OpenClaw.”
I want to be able to do that so that I can easily follow his tips.”
Ironically I was initially seeking help with OpenClaw. Didn’t take long before I realised I didn’t need OpenClaw at all.
Knowing what a directory is, how to install something, or that you need to copy a URL into a browser isn't a developer skill, it's a baseline IT, or at least it used to be, until everything was dumbed down "for normies".
I did! Was not helpful - tried to set me up in the terminal, in a very confusing way, rather than the desktop app. Even though I said I was using the desktop app.
I know exactly what you mean. It happens often that the Claude instance i start a session with in the desktop app thinks it is claude.ai. I'm beginning to realize though that claude work is claude code without the terminal interface. Like you I have no IT background and it can be quite frustrating
Which is fine, it's coming. But not yet and shouldn't be marketed as very simple.
The point I am making tho is some of these tools are being marketed to non tech folks but they still are not that accessible for the vast majority of people from a UX standpoint
Yes how ironic that the tool apparently designed to decimate software development careers can only be weilded by actual software developers. Thanks for this clarifying demonstration. The AI hype pushers are out of their minds.
I agree completely! I tried to use Claude Code to scrape a daily crossword puzzle from a website and automatically printing it out on my local printer. I do this manually now and wanted to automate the process. I used Claude LLM as a guide to each step. (Claude said this was a perfect application for Claude Code)
Used up all my tokens the first day with very little progress. And far from doing all the coding with very little interface by me, I had to hover by my terminal to approve the “OK to proceed” requests from CC every 3-5 minutes. I complained to Claude who eventually admitted this wasn’t a very good application of CC and that since I wasn’t familiar with coding that Claude Code was not an appropriate tool for my use.
At least now I know I’m not missing out in anything!
There's "Context Dumping" where its a person having a conversation with LLM's and evolving their ideas. Nothing wrong with this approach if you also follow the primary sources too.
There is agentic which is a design pattern for scaling business needs using LLM's as non-deterministic workers. For the most part they do a good job in this setup, but sometimes more expensive than just writing code like a normal human first.
It's not a "this way or that way". You can find what works for you. That's what's neat about it. The models. Croissant ML. Hugging Face. Lots of good stuff you can dive into and not be captured by the token economy with off the shelf PC hardware.
Thanks Todd!
I have finally gotten around to using Claude Code and am loving the ability to use natural language to edit my website's theme files, but as I was using I was having the same thoughts as you: if you don't already know code or have a background in how software functions it's not going to do much more than a standard chatbot.
You’re doing it wrong. Don’t use Claude Code directly.
Use Claude as an intermediary. You explain to Claude what you want to do, it will create the prompts to copy into Claude Code.
I am not a programmer and I built an entire logistics system in 3 days.
Yeah u still have to understand how to set up Claude code in order to copy prompts into Claude code
Nope. Claude walked me through the entire thing. If anyone asked me how to set up Claude Code, I wouldn’t have a clue how to do it.
I started with a completely fresh Mac.
I’ve just scrolled right back to the beginning of my very first interaction with Claude. This was the exact prompt:
“How do I go about installing Claude Code on my Mac Studio so that you can help me with installation of skills?
See this X post here - https://x.com/_sean_matthew/status/2028902126005653889
He mentions “You might be wondering: why not just have OpenClaw install its own skills and tools? It can absolutely do that, and I use it that way frequently. But just as often, I use Claude Code as the background architect of my OpenClaw.”
I want to be able to do that so that I can easily follow his tips.”
Ironically I was initially seeking help with OpenClaw. Didn’t take long before I realised I didn’t need OpenClaw at all.
This isn’t an AI problem
It’s a UX problem
Tools are powerful
But workflows are broken for non-devs
Google is solving this differently
AI inside tools people already use
That shift matters more than better models
If you want to see how that actually plays out:
👉 All-in-One Google AI: Tools, Workflows & Productivity (https://shorturl.at/hBVBS)
Knowing what a directory is, how to install something, or that you need to copy a URL into a browser isn't a developer skill, it's a baseline IT, or at least it used to be, until everything was dumbed down "for normies".
Yeah, I didn't know what to ask other than how do I download Claude code
I built a pretty useful Chrome extension in Claude Code in 2 hours with only text prompting. I didn't write or review a single line of code.
Did u know how to get set up in Claude code?
Did you ask Claude chat for help with setting it up?
I did! Was not helpful - tried to set me up in the terminal, in a very confusing way, rather than the desktop app. Even though I said I was using the desktop app.
I know exactly what you mean. It happens often that the Claude instance i start a session with in the desktop app thinks it is claude.ai. I'm beginning to realize though that claude work is claude code without the terminal interface. Like you I have no IT background and it can be quite frustrating
I didn't use the terminal interface. It was the desktop app where there are 3 tabs - chat, cowork and code
Claude takes some setup. Codex is much easier to get going
Interesting!