"I Haven't Written Code in 8 Months. I've Never Built More."

#ai #webdev #productivity #podcast

I've been having the same conversation with my colleagues for months. What does it mean to create educational content for developers when the audience is shifting to people who may not write code at all?

In Episode 7 of Making Software, I talked to James Quick, Developer Educator at Cloudflare. He's been in developer relations for 13 years, starting at Microsoft before most people knew that was a job. He hasn't written a line of code in 8 months, and in that time he's built more than ever before.

The audience we've been building for has quietly changed. We call them builders now. People who want to ship things and don't want to understand what's underneath. That changes what educational content is actually for, and most people making it haven't updated yet.
Building for yourself has a different math now. James built a Frame.io clone for his team, cancelled his QuickBooks subscription, and replaced Descript. His point isn't that everyone should do this. It's that the cost of building something for yourself has dropped enough that the old calculation doesn't hold anymore.
AEO is the thing most teams aren't thinking about yet. Cloudflare is actively working on what it means to show up when a builder tells an LLM "deploy my app." Answer Engine Optimization. Most developer tool teams haven't started on this.
Every app you build should have an MCP server. James says he can't think of a single thing he's built that wouldn't benefit from being agent-accessible. Manual data entry is just the worst version of any workflow.

Things that stuck with me

I admitted something in this episode I've been avoiding saying out loud. I miss coding. But the second an LLM does something in seconds, I catch myself thinking "do I really, though?" James is on the complete opposite end of that. He told me:

"Not writing code is not a concern for me at all. Like, I don't miss that one bit."

Two people doing the same job, arriving at completely different places about what this shift means. I found that more useful than any hot take about whether AI is taking developer jobs.

The Twitter argument about QuickBooks stayed with me. Someone pushed back on James saying he hadn't really replaced it because he was missing credit card integrations and enterprise features. His answer:

"I don't need to build a SaaS product that works for other people. I am the user."

That reframed something for me. I always default to thinking about what something would need to look like at scale, about what it would take for other people to use it. He just didn't. That's a more useful default than I've been giving it credit for.

And then there was Dropcast. He was drowning in things he wanted to learn and built a tool that takes links, crawls them, generates a podcast episode, and pushes it to an RSS feed he listens to on his commute. I immediately thought: I need this.

I left this conversation still unsure whether I miss coding or just the feeling of having written something. But I'm thinking about the build vs buy question differently now.

Are you still thinking of yourself as a developer, or has that shifted to something else? I'm curious how people are sitting with this. Let me know in the comments.