AI Coding Assistants Won’t Build Your Next Great Idea

But used correctly they might just help you learn enough to build something even better yourself.

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Should You Read This Article

A lot has been said about the latest wave of AI coding assistants — and for good reason. As if by magic, they’re able to take a few straightforward instructions and build software in seconds that would take experienced developers hours or days to produce.

Does this mean non-technical founders can now build products themselves? Not really.

But it does mean that with the right technical grounding, more ambitious software can be built faster and more robustly.

It wasn’t long ago that I was a non-technical founder and made all the mistakes a non-technical founder can make. Would life have been different if I’d started this business in the new era of AI coding assistants we find ourselves in?

To cut a long story short: no. AI wouldn’t have saved me — and it won’t save you — from the challenges needed to start a successful business in technology or otherwise.

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Writing Software Has Gotten Much Easier

There’s no shortage of content online about AI coding assistants and how the days of software engineers are supposedly numbered.

If you don’t know what an AI coding assistant is, imagine something like ChatGPT but embedded inside the program software engineers use to build applications. Instead of replying with plain text, the coding assistant writes code, creates files, scripts, and configurations that deliver the functionality you asked for.

A few of the current leading contenders in this space are Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and Cursor.

Coding assistants are one of the most compelling use cases for how AI will revolutionise human productivity. Software engineering is especially ripe for this revolution because of:

• the precision of the semantic meaning as expressed by code, and;
• the vast amount of high-quality, labeled code used to train these AI models.

Furthermore, almost all software code can be tested using methods that are themselves written in code. We now have a scenario where an AI model both understands how to write code and how to test the code its written to check whether it works as expected.

In other words: AI models can “teach” themselves to code at an unimaginable velocity — no human-in-the-loop required.

Contrast this with AI models attempting to write prose or create images. Yes, AI can write grammatically flawless text because it’s encoded with the rules of grammar, syntax, and spelling. And it can render an image of the night sky because it has “seen” (and continues to see) thousands of images of night skies.

But whether an AI has written something Shakespearean or created a piece of art worthy of Van Gogh is entirely subjective. The only real way to “test” whether the output is any good is by asking unreliable, capricious, and slow humans what they think.

AI models hallucinate (i.e., spew nonsense) far less when writing code than when asked to perform subjective or creative tasks.

All this is to say: AI coding assistants are insanely capable and will certainly change how humans approach software development.

My opinion? They’ll free us from the grunt work and give us more time for creativity, empathy, and critical thinking — to ask whether we should build the thing, whether we’re building it right, and how it might affect the people who use it.

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Coding Assistants in Action: Claude Code

At the time of writing, Claude Code is arguably the best AI coding assistant in terms of sheer capability and code quality. It’s powered by Anthropic’s Opus 4 model, which many consider the best foundational model for code creation right now.

That may change by the time you read this, but it doesn’t really affect the broader point.

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If You Want To Play Along

I try to write articles I would’ve been able to follow before I learned to code. Hopefully, the instructions below are clear. If not, drop me a message.

You don’t need to follow along to understand this article — but if you do, note that you’ll need to be on Anthropic’s Pro Plan (currently £13/month). Below are some instructions to allow you to follow along, if anything doesn’t work, just paste the steps into your favourite chatbot and ask for help.

1. Get yourself a coding application (technically an IDE) like VS Code
2. Install Node (something your computer needs to run JavaScript outside of browsers)
3. Create a folder on your desktop called claude-code-playground (or whatever you want) and drag this into VS Code
4. With the folder appearing in the left hand “Explorer” panel, goto the top menu Terminal > New Terminal
5. In the terminal at the bottom run npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
6. You will be guided through some authentication

If everything’s worked, typing claude in the terminal should launch Claude Code and ask for permission to take actions on your behalf. Say yes — and let’s get cracking. Well let’s get Claude cracking…

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Imagining Myself Then and Now

Now that we’ve got Claude Code running, let’s illustrate the point of this article by imagining me a few years ago — before I knew how to code — magically transported into this era of coding assistants.

Let’s say “Old Me” wanted to start a business today selling antique cookbooks. Not too far-fetched, since I do own a lot of cookbooks…

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Into the Mind of Old Zeid with the New Coding Assistants

So the below is a stream of consciousness of pre-coder Zeid’s thoughts and actions if he was in today’s world of AI coding assistants trying to build a tech product.

Ok so the antique cookbook market is an under-served vertical and eBay is a bunch of shite so I’ve got a 100x business opportunity on my hands here. Based on my limited understanding of tech I think I’ll need: a front-end (showing off the cookbooks) and an admin area where I can add, edit and remove cookbooks and information about them. I guess I need somewhere to store the data and images per cookbook.

In terms of my engineering “stack”, I’ve come across a poorly written article on software stacks and armed with this knowledge I’ve decided to use a React, Next.js and MongoDB stack. I don’t really know what any of this means, but who cares Claude Code will figure it all out.

Claude Code is eagerly awaiting my instructions in the VS Code Terminal. I’ve refined my idea into the following instructions which I’ll throw at Claude.

Build a full-stack web app with:

• A frontend that displays cookbooks to users
• An admin area where I (the site owner) can add, edit, and delete cookbooks and their info
• A database (MongoDB) to store the cookbook data
• An API that connects the frontend to the database for CRUD operations

Use a React + Next.js + MongoDB stack

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What Claude Code Did Next

Incredibly Claude read the above prompt and its first step was very human, it created a todo list.

As Claude starts to get on with the first task 1 it asks whether I want to run a command:

1npx create-next-app@latest cookbook-app --typescript --tailwind --eslint --app --src-dir --import-alias "@/*" 
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No idea what that means — but it mentioned Next.js, and I asked for that. So yes Claude, crack on bruv.

It asked about turbopack after that. Sounds sick. Let’s slap that in too.

A few minutes later I start to see files appearing in the Explorer panel in VS Code, Claude has actually started to write and build my application!

Then it asks about MongoDB and mongoose (wtf?). Whatever, I trust Claude — even if I have a healthy fear of anything that hunts Cobras.

Claude informs me the first item on the todo list has been ticked off! Awesome work Claude, I really can’t wait to tell the prospective Technical Co-founder I interviewed (modern coder Zeid) to shove his equity demands and piss off back to his sad little blog. AI is here baby - go find some other chump!

I message coder Zeid telling him that:

After careful consideration, we’ve decided to move forward with a candidate whose skills and experience more closely match the requirements of the role.

By this point I’ve got my feet up on the desk watching the opening scene of GoldenEye on my second screen whilst spamming “Yes” to a bunch of other 🤓 questions like:

1. “Do you want to make this edit to .env.local?”
2. “Do you want to create mongodb.ts?”
3. “Do you want to create Cookbook.ts?”
4. “Do you want to create global.d.ts?”
5. “Do you want to create route.ts?”

Eventually I notice that I can select the option “Yes, and don’t ask again this session”, problem solved - this is management! Back to Pierce killing his first Russian soldier on the toilet at the base he just bungee-jumped down into.

"Beg your pardon, forgot to knock"

Claude is beavering away babbling to itself by the time Alec (Sean Bean) is seemingly executed (we know better) - “For England James!”. I’m eagerly watching and waiting for Jimbo to base jump off a motorbike into a plane plummeting to the valley floor.

By the time I look back at VS Code Claude has just told me that everything is done and dusted. It is asking me to read something called README.md which looks like some sort of user manual - can’t be arsed with that. Thankfully Claude has also asked me the below which sounds promising:

1*“do you want to start the development server on <http://localhost:3000?”> 
2**> Yes**
3No*
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OMFG I just opened http://localhost:3000 - IT’S ALL WORKED! Claude has added a bunch of demo content. I can see cookbooks, with loads of info, I can login to the admin area and add/edit/delete cookbooks - this is insane!!

After about 10 minutes of marvelling I realise that I can’t actually click on an individual cookbook and get a specific detail page for that cookbook, eBay has that I’m want it too. Back to Claude:

Give me a detail page for each cookbook when I click on one

Piece of piss - it’s done and looks great! But I want my website to be shades of blue in colour scheme.

Change the colour scheme to shades of blue

Beautiful, I’m an instinctive web-designer too. After much playing with the website, I’ve realised that I need a basket, a checkout page and some way for people to buy the products.

I need a basket, a checkout page and some way for customers to buy cookbooks and I want you to make the site live on the internet!

After what seems like an eternity, Claude has done it again. Or has it??

Oh shit, what does any of this mean?! Ok maybe Claude can fix what he broke.

Claude you broke the website, fix it!

After assuring me that the error is fixable Claude does a bunch of stuff and informs me the problem has been fixed. BUT IT HASN’T. I go so far as to paste the actual error into Claude to see what’s going on and it seems to fix the original error, but now we have a new error:

After many hours of playing critical-error-whack-a-mole with Claude it starts to become apparent to me that I am absolutely clueless. I neither understand what the errors are, what Claude’s suggested fixes are and what I need to do outside of VS Code to get my application live and running on the actual internet.

Claude has turned into a huge dickhead and started throwing all sorts of things at me which apparently require my attention. I’ve been told to sort out Vercel, MongoDB Atlas, Stripe, DNS Records, blob storage, staging environments, production environments, env variables, NodeMailer, GitHub and all sorts of other nonsense. I don’t know what to do, I am overwhelmed - how can I run a business when I literally have to pray Claude has the answers to absolutely everything technical? I have an application which contains a bunch of folders and files, of which I understand almost to nothing and which doesn’t even turn on without shitting the bed.

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Back to Reality: Businesses Built on Sand

Ok now returning to reality where Old Zeid is back in the past.

Above is a bit of a dramatisation of what actually might have happened. Old Zeid would probably have done a bit of research using AI chatbots to understand technical things a bit better. Ultimately the outcome would have been the same, he would have run up against an impenetrable wall of technical troubleshooting and had no idea how to even ask Claude to implement the appropriate solutions. What’s more, the proposed cookbook app was a super simple e-commerce setup no where near where an MVP would need to be.

The idea that with very little technical background you can build an application using AI coding assistants, is very misleading at best. Even a simple e-commerce application that we tried to build above became un-workable for somebody non-technical about 30 minutes into the process. If by some feat of magic it was made to work, is it really an acceptable business risk to hope that any issues, maintenance, feature extensions in the future would be successfully handled by tools like Claude Code? How can you be sure that you are securing data properly with proper redundancy? Do you know if your application is scalable, how would you measure and improve performance? Has your AI assistant chosen supporting software packages that are compromised, bloated or soon to be deprecated?

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What AI Does Mean for the Non-Technical Founder

Artificial Intelligence has democratised the access to the technical elements of almost every profession, software engineering is no different. Nonetheless, I hope the above has helped convince you that we are not (yet) in a world where AI will just surmount all and any of the technical barriers to building software applications.

The good news is that compared to even five years ago the game really has changed for non-technical founders. By far the biggest benefit of AI for anybody looking to start a business is the wealth of information it can provide to empower founders to make better technical decisions for their businesses.

My advice to any non-technical founders would be to avoid the temptation of asking AI to just solve problems and instead take the slightly harder route of using it to develop the right level of technical knowledge to help them build the best businesses they can. This could be developing an understanding of the fundamental moving parts within software applications. It could mean understanding how to simplify the engineering within an MVP whilst allowing it to be scaled properly in the future. It could mean enabling them to identify the right technical skills from a co-founder, CTO or agency to help build and support their project.

If, like me, you feel that you want to actually get to a point where you can build the product behind your next business idea then there has never been a better time to use AI to learn. It is almost omnipotent in software engineering, endlessly patient and hugely flexible in terms of pedagogy.

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Start Learning With AI

So if you’ve followed the above you might actually have Claude Code running within VS Code right now. As a first step in your journey as an entrepreneur trying to get to grips with the technical aspect of the business why don’t you try the following:

1. Create a new folder on your computer called learn-fullstack or whatever
2. Open this folder in VS Code and run a terminal in this folder
3. Firem up Claude Code by running claude in the terminal
4. Give Claude the following prompt: “look i know nothing about software engineering, I want you to build me something which will teach me full stack software development from first principles”