I keep seeing the same message online. Stop building tools for developers. Build apps that let non-technical people do things they couldn’t do before. If you’re not doing that, you’re behind.

I looked into whether that’s actually true.

What the data saysLink to heading

It’s a real trend. 63% of people using AI coding tools aren’t developers — they’re product managers, founders, marketers. The market for these tools is growing fast. Writers everywhere are saying the same thing: “engineer” is out, “builder” is in. Anyone who understands a problem can try to solve it now, no CS degree needed.

That’s one half of the story.

Benedict Evans pushed back on this. His point: wanting a tool and being able to describe it clearly enough for AI to build it well are different skills. Most people can describe what they want. Few turn that into something actually useful.

The quality numbers back him up. Trust in AI-generated code dropped from 77% to 60%, even as more people use it. Bug rates are up 41%. Security problems show up almost three times as often as in code a person wrote by hand.

More people are building. Fewer of those things hold up.

Where I’ve landedLink to heading

I already build small apps for people who don’t code — a ward website, a family game, a couple of other small tools. Not because I read a trend piece. It’s just what I’ve been doing.

What I’ve learned doing it: getting something into a non-technical person’s hands isn’t the hard part anymore. AI makes that part easy. The hard part is making sure it doesn’t quietly break in a way nobody catches — because the person using it can’t read the code, and there’s no one checking it after me.

That’s most of why mx-workflow ended up the way it did. Most of its agents don’t write code. They check code that’s already been written, for the stuff that slips through when nobody’s reading closely.

What I’m taking from thisLink to heading

The trend is right about one thing: build for someone who isn’t you, that’s where AI actually helps. But shipping isn’t the finish line people are treating it as. Making the thing something someone can depend on is the part that still takes real work, and no model does that part for you.