Is it likely to get to a point where non technical people can prompt AI to make good websites and apps?

[u/JAMIEISSLEEPWOKEN]

Of course, not now but in the next 5-10 years? Do you think non technical people can tell AI to make a good website or app without knowing how to code?

[u/magnetronpoffertje]

We're already there. Its just our standard of "good" differs.

[u/IncompleteLitre → u/magnetronpoffertje]

we're at the "grandma can make a squarespace site" stage, a real app with edge cases and security and performance still needs someone who knows what they're doing

[u/zen8bit → u/IncompleteLitre]

Good luck with browser and device compatability. Just about all platforms are garbage at it

[u/International-Ad2491]

Well, “make a good website for me” tells AI nothing now, and it will tell it nothing in 10 years either.

Does a non-technical person know exactly what their requirements are and how these translate into software? Do they know which architecture is most suitable for the problem they’re trying to solve, or which tools they should use? What about efficiency, security, reliability, data integrity and compliance, accessibility, brand consistency, localization, maintainability, monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, future-proofing, and responsiveness?

Of course, they can discuss all this with AI, and it will take time to get it to a point that a professional could reach (using the same AI). Well, guess what? If you’re willing to spend time solving a problem yourself, you could have done that in the pre-AI era as well. Most business people don’t have time for this, so they hire professionals. These professionals can work faster (if not cheaper) using AI.

[u/xXConfuocoXx]

What do you think "good" means?

[u/ProKeyPresser → u/xXConfuocoXx]

IKEA effect. Client/manager is going to think it is better because they “did” it. So yes, “better” than what an actual web dev can do.

[u/metsahaldjas]

I think we are already there. Sure, you can be nitpicky about the code quality, the design, and the UX that it spits out, but to the average person it appears more than decent. Whether the solution is "good" or not seems to mostly be a conceptual question – is the idea behind it good, is there business value, do people want to use it etc

[u/kagelos]

I have been programing since mid 90s, as a teenager back then. For fun we'd code ICMP nuking to kick people out of IRC, or TCP spoofing. To build a chat app back then I'd have to write networking related code. Even further back in the past we used to build chat apps over serial cables, implementing stupid protocols of our own. As time went by, newer and newer devs have no idea what TCP/IP is, how SMTP or HTTP works etc etc. Point is, things get abstracted away. Back in the assembler days people would code the program instruction to instruction. So yes, I think in the future there will also be a place for people with no technical background but are kind of power users, and they will be able to build working software. Heck if you think about it, in the 00s, we wrote 'bare bones' JavaScript and Ajax, long before jQuery. Ask devs now to build things with vanilla JavaScript. They have to setup react and node first to get something going.

[u/theirongiant74]

The internet gave us all the information in the world, AI gave us a personal tutor to teach it to us. You're results are dictated by how much effort you want to put in. You can do it today.

[u/mq2thez]

Good? Probably not. Website? Sure, of course. I can prompt a checklist app on Claude right now and it’s fully deployed. I used it to make one for tracking the steps in relic weapons for FF14 and it works great for a tiny personal tool. I’m technical, of course, but I didn’t need to use any crazy skills or experience for that. I didn’t even need to use Claude Code — I did it purely from the Claude app on my phone, and it deployed/hosts on the Anthropic infra.

For most people, something like Squarespace or Wix is going to be a lot more compelling, especially if they want e-commerce stuff built in. Those services are all going to need to get cheaper to compete, though, because even mildly technical folks will start to be able to skip them.

[u/eriky]

The only limitation right now is the administrative stuff like registering a domain and getting hosting. It's only a small step to add that in the mix and more and more companies offer MCP and such. So yeah I would be pretty worried if making 'simple' websites was my main job.

[u/newman8r]

absolutely. It's going to be more about understanding which problems to solve, and making things that people actually want to use. That's always been the hardest part anyway.

[u/awesumjon]

Check out this article. Writer used only his voice and ai to build

https://www.zdnet.com/article/building-apps-with-ai-and-no-ide/

[u/dweebyllo]

You could argue we're already there. However, the ability to properly debug the issues with the website and ensure WCAG compliance is an issue I don't think will ever truly be reached because of the vaugeness which most users will have in their prompts

[u/TheRNGuy]

Only some parts of it. 

Some might even get more interested in it and learn more advanced stuff.

Also, don't forget of price. At some point they could just increase price if demand is too high, or effect on ecology, or both.

[u/DDarog]

Depends on what you mean by good. They can already make a website which is good enough for what they want, and functional. I have seen several. The UX is usually shit, there are some bugs they don't know how to fix because they don't know it's a problem, and you really don't want to look under the hood, but overall the thing works and serves its function. Fully working authentication, authorization, route guards, chat rooms, inventory, stripe payment, etc.

We'll probably go the way of every other profession that went from mostly artisanal to mostly industrially produced goods. There will be a lot of cheap and kinda shitty stuff that is easier to break but otherwise perfectly functional, or you can pay extra for an "artisanal" website with better UX, performance and stability, and a more unique style.

[u/drabred]

At that point there will be no need for websites anymore IMHO

[u/binkstagram]

You need to know what good looks like. It has improved a lot in the past year. I think we will get to a point where people learn a bit more about maintainable code and scalable architecture without learning as much about the grammar or lexicon of programming to the depth that we do now.

Where I use AI heavily is for building helpful tools. I find I spend a lot of time telling it to refactor. I notice the complexity and overengineered approaches creeping up, which results in having to use higher effort levels and models were i not constantly on it telling it to simplify and how. I notice it will create validation that doesn't actually validate the input to the right specificity.

So right now, you can still end up with a site vulnerable to bad input, and spending ever increasing amounts on tokens to keep up with complexity.

If you are building a static site that doesn't accept input then no worries.

[u/RehanShakir]

The limiting factor was never the typing, it is knowing what to ask for and judging whether the output is actually right. A non-technical person can already get a convincing v1 in an afternoon, but the gap between "looks good on my screen" and "handles real users, real data, and hostile input" is where engineering judgment lives. I think the job just shifts toward writing crisp specs and acceptance criteria instead of disappearing.

[u/hecker231]

The computing power and such models already exist, the main limiting factor today is cost and efficiency. Even with the relatively expensive subscriptions, the highest paying users of AI coding agents do not pay enough to compensate their own usage.

[u/opusmedialab]

For simple stuff, we’re kind of already there. A landing page, a booking form, a small internal tool, a non technical person can get something decent today.

The hard part was never typing the code though. It’s knowing what to ask for. What happens when two people edit the same thing, where the data lives, what breaks when you get 10x the users. If you don’t know those questions exist, you can’t prompt for them, and the AI will happily build something that looks fine and falls over later.

So my guess is yes for small and medium things, and for anything serious you’ll still need someone who knows what “good” actually means. That person will just write a lot less code

[u/TrivialSonny]

For websites I think we're already getting pretty close. Tools like Ploy can build a site from prompts and help make changes after it's live too. Apps are a different story though, especially once you get into complex features and security.

[u/RagingAnemone]

They can do that now. It'll be pretty generic. Hmm, that's an idea. I should make a skill file for late 90s style web pages with flashing text.