Of course! Non-programmers have been making applications for decades, well before there was anything like AI helping them. In my experience, the people who really want to make applications learn what they need to learn. AI closes that gap. No-code tools do that too. So does having things like npm, htmx, React, Pandas, SQLite, AWS, etc. But, the motivated can close bigger gaps if they have to.

My first job was in 1992, working for a company that made FX Options Pricing software. That company was founded by an FX Options trader who was a “non-programmer” until he wasn’t. He taught himself enough C to make simple programs to help him price options at work, and just kept making them better until he was able to sell copies to FX Options brokers and traders. And then he used the money to hire programmers, but he still worked on it for at least the first five years of the company.

A couple of jobs later, I got a job at a startup where the first versions were written by the founder, a mechanical engineer, who probably took programming courses, but was not a “professional programmer”. His first two hires were also self-taught. They went from hacking around with scanners and simple websites to building the web-based scanning and Ajax document viewers that were the basis of our acquisition.

At both places, programmers (like me) were brought in. We added some “professionalism” to the codebase and processes. We helped the teams scale, the products be more reliable, and the delivery be more predictable. But bringing us in was just another tool they used to close the gap.