You Build for People, Not Robots
An evening in Shymkent, an Americano, and some thoughts on Claude, vibe coders, and the one thing LLMs cannot copy — the connection between a product and the people who use it.
It is evening in Shymkent, where I am temporarily residing, and the city becomes extremely beautiful at this time of day. People outside are chatty and happy, birds are singing, cars are moving slowly somewhere. I pulled myself out of my tasks for a bit and decided to have a coffee — an Americano, of course.
Yeah, I know, I know — Italian fellas would not approve of my coffee tastes. God forgive me, I am so attached to Americano that I drink it on any occasion. I do not smoke, but it seems like my cigarettes are coffee.
So I sat down at the nearest coffee shop with my laptop, which never leaves my sight (ha), and started to contemplate how Claude is doing its stuff. Amazing! It just constructed a whole feature for me. Wonderful, is it not?
So Now Everybody Can Code?
Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I am sure about is that it is inevitable that more and more people become vibe coders — and that is great.
One day I saw one of my fellas with eyes full of amusement and happiness, holding a product he had built himself. For a middle-level manager — a role he had been in for eight years — this is truly a miracle. And honestly, LLM capability is a miracle for experienced developers too. Right?
I mean, at their core, LLMs are huge neural networks that return the next token with the highest probability. Nothing magical when you put it like that. But the result feels magical anyway, and that is what matters to the person holding the product they shipped.
What LLMs Cannot Copy
Here is what I have been thinking about. With LLMs like Claude Code, experienced developers can build — or basically copy — almost any existing app, and even make it better. Or they can build something completely new from scratch in a matter of weeks.
But what is more important and more valuable than the code is the connections.
You cannot copy the feelings a product gives to its user. You cannot copy the behavior people have with a certain app, the rituals they build around a website, the trust they place in a brand. Name it — you cannot copy it. It is trust and feeling, and those live between the product and the human on the other side. It can be only earned with hard work.
Build for People
Some might feel almost almighty with Claude Code in their hands, and to some extent that is true. The leverage is real. But if you are building something valuable, you are building it for people, not for robots.
People are the core of any product. No matter how LLMs develop, that does not change.
The coffee is almost finished. The birds are still singing. I am going to enjoy the rest of this evening.