But the entire "software for startups or other software developers" ecosystem is going to get thrashed by churn (not unlike the Javascript ecosystem)

William Gibson's quote that 'The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed' is only going to become even more real

Languages like BASIC and Python have always been useful to people for whom programming is a part-time thing. Sure you have to learn something but it is not like learning assembly or C++.

On the other hand, it is notorious that people who don't know anything about programming can accomplish a little bit with LLM tools and then they get stuck.

It's part of what is so irksome about the slop blog posts about AI coding that HN is saturated with now. If you've accomplished something with AI coding it is because of: (1) your familiarity with the domain you're working in and (2) your general knowledge about how programming environments work. With (1) and (2) you can recognize the different between a real solution and a false solution and close the gap when something "almost works". Without it, you're going to go around in circles at best. People are blogging as if their experience with prompting or their unscientific experiments about this model and that model were valuable but they're not, (1) and (2) are valuable, anything specific about AI coding 2026-02-18 will be half-obsolete on 2026-02-19; so of course they face indifference.