Originally shared on LinkedIn

A few months ago my husband came to me with a brilliant idea he wanted to build. This was not the first time someone had approached me with a great idea that just needed to get built by a software engineer (i.e. me).

This time I handed it back to him.

I set him up with Claude Code and walked him through the basics: how to prompt it to start a project, how to test as you go, and the importance of committing in stages so Claude won’t accidentally write over all your work and delete it 🤦‍♀️

He started on my MacBook, which already had dependencies set up. Eventually I wanted my computer back, so we migrated to his Windows machine. Getting his project running in a new environment meant working through a fresh round of errors; some I recognized but never remember how to solve, others entirely new to me.

That troubleshooting brought me back to what it felt like to be an early engineer. The intimidation of unknown errors. Tutorials already outdated by the time you found them. Stack Overflow answers that got you 80% of the way there. The barrier to just getting started was so high.

With Claude Code, that barrier is lower. Not gone, you still need to know what direction you’re going. But that wall of errors that used to stop people before they even started? Now there’s a ladder.

The project was genuinely impressive for something built in one evening, especially when my first project was Hello World. Looking below the surface though, there were over a thousand lines in a single file, no error handling, no loading states. It worked, but there was more to address. Knowing what to look for is still the engineer’s job.

I don’t think AI replaces engineers. I think it changes what engineering looks like. And I think there’s a lot of room in that shift for people like my husband to start building things they couldn’t before. It removes obstacles that some might never get past. At times when I was starting out, I worried I might be one of them.

He was certainly motivated. He kept going enthusiastically right up until he used up all my credits for the day.

What’s your experience with AI coding tools? Has it changed how you build? I’d love to hear your thoughts.