AI Has Lowered the Technical Barrier, but Not the Barrier to Creating

Keywords:

• Vibe Coding
• Technical Barrier
• Creativity
• Productivity Liberation
• AI Tools

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Most of the time I write at home. But sometimes I want to write somewhere different.

Today, for example, I went to the library near my place and found a seat. I've realized my apartment is in a great spot. For one thing, there's a subway station right outside my complex, and the line isn't that crowded with commuters.

For another, if I walk out the complex's other gate and cross one street, I'm at a public library, where it's quiet and easy to sink into writing. And about 300 meters from the library there's a Starbucks. So within less than a kilometer, I can choose to write at home, at the library, or at a café.

Writing somewhere new now and then stimulates the brain, because the setting is fresh. In the past, whenever I was writing something I found really challenging, I'd go somewhere else to write it.

Lately, compared with last year, the amount I use AI as a tool has made a qualitative leap.

I don't like keeping a lot of apps in my Dock. I used to not even keep WeChat there. But now there are six apps that live in my Dock permanently.

• Obsidian: my writing app
• Gemini: Google's AI product
• NotebookLM: Google's AI product
• Claude: Anthropic's AI product
• Visual Studio Code: a code editor
• Terminal: macOS's built-in command-line tool

Apart from Obsidian, my writing tool, the other five all have something to do with AI.

So far, I've used AI to do three things I could never have done before.

• With Gemini guiding me, I built a personal blog on Hugo and GitHub by myself
• With help from Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, I wrote my own app for managing information sources
• With help from Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, I built a personal blog on Hugo and GitHub again

These three things happened in order, and along the way, the nature of AI as a tool changed. Take my two attempts at building a blog as an example.

The first time, I built the blog with Gemini guiding me. I'd talk to Gemini, tell it how I wanted to build it, and ask it to list detailed steps. Then I'd follow those steps one by one. If I hit a problem, I sent Gemini a screenshot, and it gave me a fix.

Even then, I already thought AI was incredibly powerful. Building a blog by hand like that used to be something I wouldn't even dare imagine. There were so many steps, the operations were so tedious, and some baffling problem could pop up at any moment. Without AI, any one of those problems would have been enough to make me quit.

But for this kind of thing, AI is practically an all-knowing god. One screenshot, and it can immediately tell where the problem is and walk you through the fix. And the fix often actually works.

Then I tried Vibe Coding for the first time and realized I'd been using AI all wrong.

The magic of Vibe Coding is that I know nothing about programming or software, and yet I can program.

It reminded me of Steve Jobs at the launch of the original iPhone, telling the audience that all you need is the best pointing device in the world, your finger, to tap the screen and use the apps on it.

Vibe Coding is the same. All you need is the best programming tool in the world, your ideas. Then you use your fingers to talk to whatever AI model you have, and you can start programming. You don't even need to understand a single line of code.

From where I stand, even if I went and properly learned some programming, what I learned would be worthless next to AI. If some day an AI coding tool tried to hide a bomb in the code to wipe out my data and projects, my little bit of programming knowledge wouldn't catch it.

Here's my hot take: Vibe Coding isn't just an upgrade to the tools of production. It's a liberation of productive forces in our time, and it deserves to be seen.

It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is carried on.

I say this for one reason only: someone like me can program and create a piece of software through Vibe Coding.

No matter which AI model I use, no matter how bad my ideas are, no matter how poorly I write my prompts, none of that can hide one sharp fact: I can do this.

I'm just an ordinary person. How far was I from programming before? I can't even picture it. Back then, forget building software around my own needs. Even setting up a blog would have taken a huge amount of study time. For now, I'll call this, the time a person has to invest in a technology or method, "the technical barrier."

What AI does is lower that technical barrier until it almost disappears. The barrier isn't completely gone. At the very least, you need to download Doubao on your phone.

Still, even though AI has made the technical barrier very low, it also got me thinking.

Is having the tool enough? Tools are part of productive forces, but they aren't all of them. Owning the most advanced tool doesn't mean you'll suddenly burst with creativity. It's like being handed a gun: if you don't know how to chamber a round and pull the trigger, it's all talk.

Yesterday I was using AI to build my new blog, and this time was different from the last. Last time, after I set up the blog, I didn't take any next step. I didn't push my first post, and I didn't do any further design or polishing of the pages.

This time, thanks to Claude Code, I started taking the initiative.

There's just one reason.

Last time, I was scared of something as basic as pushing my changes from the Terminal. Yes, forget whether I could use all sorts of commands in the Terminal to change my blog's code. Every time I made a change, I also had to push all of it before it showed up on my blog.

I couldn't get past even that one step. Claude is different. I can authorize Claude Code to push the changes itself after it makes them.

All I have to say is:

• Push
• Push all the changes we just made

And then I don't have to do anything. Of course, it doesn't stop there. Claude can read and write code, so I can have it do a lot of things.

There's another fascinating thing about Vibe Coding. With such an advanced-sounding concept, users always feel they need to say something sophisticated to the AI for it to work well. But in reality, most of what I say to the AI looks like this:

• Now let's do some custom design on the blog
• Remove the underline from the menu bar buttons
• Remove every underline on the site
• Remove the Posts section from the homepage and keep only the weekly
• Change Post to Writing

Instruction after instruction like these, simple and almost silly, turned my blog step by step into what I had in mind. I could even just say something like this:

• Change the light/dark mode toggle from text to a sun and a moon in a simple line-drawing style.

The AI got it the way I wanted on the first try.

That's where all my awe of AI comes from. It's so simple and so powerful. Just like on the original iPhone, where you tapped a contact and it called them, I only have to say what I need, and the AI makes my idea happen.

But in theory, anyone who signs up for an AI account can start Vibe Coding. So why hasn't this low-barrier, open-to-everyone entry point set off an explosion of technology?

AI lowers the technical barrier, and ordinary people can start programming easily. That's what AI gives ordinary people. But at the same time, Vibe Coding asks for abilities beyond programming.

Yes, you really don't need to know how to program anymore. Someone does that for you now. But understand this: AI has lowered the barrier to learning programming, but it hasn't lowered the barrier to creating.

Programming is a means of creating, and a means alone is nowhere near enough. Creating through programming used to belong to programmers. Now, some programmers understand programming better than you but don't have your taste. And some programmers have better taste than you and understand programming better too.

That's the heart of the matter. In an era when everyone can program, our taste, our ability to ask a good question and state a good need, and whether we have the systems thinking to break down a complex problem: these decide whether we can hold our ground in the age of AI.

Right now, my information source app has its basic features done, but it always feels incomplete to me. I want to rework it, but I don't know where to start. That's the problem I'm facing, because all I have is an idea, and an idea alone doesn't make a piece of software.

What I'm facing now is a question of what to add and what to cut, and how it ends up getting solved depends entirely on my judgment.

There's one more thing I want to talk about.

As powerful as AI is, and as powerful as Vibe Coding is, if you want a good experience, nobody can avoid paying for AI.

And I don't just mean subscribing to some AI's Pro plan. I mean paying in many ways.

At the very least, you need a computer to run it. And if you want to run AI locally, you'll have to spend a lot on hardware.

So here's another hot take: in the future, AI subscriptions will be like phone bills, a fixed monthly expense for a lot of people.

Just as your phone plan has data, AI has its own data: tokens. Doing anything with an online AI uses tokens, the same way browsing anything on your phone uses data.

Of course, I'm not sure the AI world will ever get its own Wi-Fi.

I've now started subscribing to Claude Pro month by month. Even if Claude gets left behind someday, I'll subscribe to some other model.

This makes me wonder: if AI keeps its current prices, is AI really a fair tool?

Right now, I'm willing to spend 200 yuan a month on an AI model, while other people are willing to spend tens of thousands on the top-tier model.

Does using AI have a class character too? Judging by the subscription tiers, yes. If AI can't bring real income to everyone, then whether you subscribe, and which tier of model you subscribe to, all point to different class positions.

Luckily, though, AI is just a transformative tool, and different hands will create different things with it.

So I don't think there's any need to be too anxious.

It's like cycling. Buying a Colnago doesn't turn you into Tadej Pogačar.

At the same time, Tadej Pogačar can't do without his Colnago.

Seen this way, I think having one of tools or ability isn't enough. The relationship between them should be multiplication: output = tools × ability.

When everyone can program, that's Vibe Coding's revolutionary 0-to-1 on the tool side. But when it goes from 1 to 10, the growth in output depends on the size of your ability.

If ability is zero, no matter how strong the tool, the result is zero. That's why a low technical barrier hasn't set off an explosion.

Most people have the tools, but they haven't gotten their abilities ready.

So if you don't know where the future is, don't fixate on tools. Take a hard look at your own abilities. That matters.