Everyone can build anything
by Damla Su Bilge · 2 min read
A common argument goes like this: an accountant who can build their own form and put two lines of logic behind it does not need an engineer. About the form, that is right. What I want to know is what happens on the day it gets a second user, or a wrong date, or a customer who closes the tab halfway through a payment.
Some of the best software anyone writes is made for their own needs. I wrote the digital menu for the coffee shop where I worked as a barista. Nobody in that building writes code, and the project gave that shop something it could use. That is the whole case for everyone learning this, and the case against believing the learning stops once something runs. A menu that works and a system that stays up are not the same thing.
I think of using an LLM as working through another level of language. That is an analogy, not a claim that a model has a compiler's semantics: its output still needs interpretation and checking. Each time the level rose, more people could write, so more code existed, and more of it needed someone who could tell a working system from one nobody has stressed yet. A language has never removed the person who knows what to say in it.
That is where engineering went. It was never only typing. It is knowing what to make, connecting technologies to each other, and developing them until they hold. The distance between a thing that runs on your machine and a thing somebody else depends on is still there, and every chapter of this book is a piece of it: a key kept on the server, a check that lives in the database, a repeated payment notification that does not repeat the fulfilment, a label connected to its input, a test that fails without your fix.
These decisions are learnable through small, concrete examples. You do not need to learn it all before you start. You need to recognise the next piece when you reach it.
A small project can be complete for the person who needed it. The menu does not need to become a platform to count; it needs to show the right information and be maintainable by the people using it.
Another person may see a possibility or a missing assumption you did not. Whatever work you do, try your idea and show it to someone who has a reason to use it. The chapters ahead give you ways to investigate what happens next.
Your friendly neighbour damla will save you from the slopware world.