Today I saw a video by a popular influencer — a recording where he talks about how AI can now code as well as programmers. He presents an application he built himself, claiming to have absolutely no programming knowledge.
The app he showed displays a 60-day calendar view. For each day, you can select from a list of checkboxes. There are five items on the list — if you check all of them, the day turns green. If you only check one, two, or three, it shows as more of an orange color. Not checking any causes the day to be grayed out. It’s a simple habit tracker. I didn’t even see how he handled data persistence — whether the data was being saved anywhere — but I’m almost certain it was frontend-only, though perhaps there was some simple backend as well.
This is frequently shown nowadays as proof that programming no longer exists.
The second video I saw was someone recording how Apple’s marketing page for iPads works. They then fed that page into the Kimi 2.5 model and asked it to create a similar marketing page for an iPad product. The model produced a beautiful, polished page with animations.
Both of these cases are examples of people claiming that programming is over because people with no programming knowledge can create an application. This is a very strange and oversimplified take — though of course entirely expected in today’s climate.
What these people are doing was already possible years ago — maybe not ten years ago, but certainly five. Whether through Figma, which could be converted into a real website, or through various low-code tools — all of this has been around for quite some time.
What these demonstrations miss is that programming is also about maintenance — taking that site, keeping it running over the years, evolving it, adding new features as requirements change. That long-term work, with all the systems involved, is the genuinely hard part.