I received quite a few emails questioning the thesis of my Sunday essay, What Happens When English Becomes the Only Programming Language You Need? Rather than answer all of you individually, here’s a quick case study.
Yesterday, a dear friend of mine sent me a link to a cardboard volvelle called the “Yiddish Curse Generator.” It made me laugh out loud. If you grew up where (and when) we grew up, it would make you laugh, too. His accompanying text message simply said, “No AI required.”
I took the bait. I opened up Claude Opus 4 and typed:
“Can you build a web app that does what this volvelle does? [I inserted the link here.] If so, create a single, self-contained HTML file with CSS and JavaScript embedded, ensuring it functions independently without external resources.”
Iteration 1: “This needs to be funnier and more accurate, you’re looking for any historical references to the kind of curses you might hear in an Eastern European shtetl in the 1850s.”
Iteration 2: “The wheel metaphor is not necessary, lose it and just make a box, and let’s change the colors to blue and white. Change the button to say, ‘Generate Your Authentic Yiddish Curse'”
Iteration 3: “Let’s add the Yiddish-English transliteration for each, so that an English speaker can pretend to speak Yiddish. And, add a button that uses a text-to-speech generator to read the Yiddish curse out loud.”
Four prompts and about 10 minutes later, I clicked Claude’s publish button. Here’s the result. (BTW, I was doing other work while the AI was coding, so my actual time spent interacting with Claude was actually under five minutes.)
Obviously, this is just a silly little web app, but how many of you have the coding skills to create it from scratch? How long would it take? Today, every one of you has the skills to do this in 10 minutes with prompts, not programming. All you need is an idea, the willingness to put your hands on the keyboard, and the knowledge that the AI will help you with anything you don’t understand.
This isn’t the future; it’s right now. You can do this. Anyone can. That’s the point.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.