The Creative Non-Technical
My friend Sunny Ray mentioned to me recently the No-Code Movement. Many development tools have moved away from requiring coding.
Thinking about this took me back to my first days of doing “coding”. To avoid being bullied by my peers in the seventh grade, I’d stay inside during recess and learn how to build webpages. It was a vicious cycle for my social standing but I learned a lot. I built the school’s first website and a bulletin board system (the last of its era) for the PTA.
I was never a great coder but would be OK at stealing code from other places and repurposing it for my needs. In the eleventh grade, I made a physics calculator as a learning and a fundraiser for school. I made a bet that I’d sell $100 worth of the software to my friend Bram. I still owe the bet as I never made a dollar from sales.
As part of our final project in university on a team that was designing a UAV, I was in the integration group, responsible for making sure all the other groups worked together and that their designs synced. Beyond doing a cost estimation project, my main project was a system called “Momina” for sending and storing all project memos. At that time, there were no easy web systems like Monday or Trello so I spent a few overnighters coding a basic email form that could capture project memos. It was a basic form-to-email that had many holes but got the job done.
Eventually, I’d hire people to code and build things. Describing what needed to be built, finding the right people, and making sure they were doing the job when I couldn’t really understand how they built what they built was a learning experience. However, that learning helped me become the person that people would come to when they wanted to bring ideas to life, whether it was a website or eventually a startup.
Now, GPT3 and other similar NLG tools offer the ability to free up the creative non-technical to build things that I was once hired to do. Or, it allows me to get to prototype much faster when I do want to help others. Non-technical creatives or slightly technical creatives will be able to use ask for code, ask for the code to be explained, test, iterate and eventually build. Coding will still be needed but it will be those with a deep knowledge who be able to understand what is actually being built.
The result of this progress will mean many more people getting into the development realm who might not have been coders. This will lead to more interesting innovations that those who normally have a “technical bend” might not have thought of.
