Comment by tpmoney

I agree with your first part, that software is built to solve a problem. But I think you sort of sidestep what makes AI exciting to non-software people with your second part. The people who are excited about this aren't excited because they can ask for a todo app but because they can solve the problem the todo app was supposed to be soling for them without needing to find and learn a todo app.

AI is the new "excel spreadsheet with ridiculous formulas on top of VB script on top of pivot tables" for the non-programmers. Yes, the AI might not do it efficiently or even always give the right answers, but the spreadsheets didn't either. For non-programmers, the computer has always been a black box, data goes in, data comes out. Usually it's right, sometimes it's wrong and the users mostly had no idea why or how. But now they don't need the middleware app. They don't need to take their data and split it up into very specially structured files, and put just the right pieces of information on just the right lines and in the right spaces. They don't need to remember to do "(foo and (bar or baz))" to get the right answer, as opposed to "(foo and bar or baz)" and get the wrong one. AI for non-programmers is the closest we've ever come to "natural language programming" for people to use. It doesn't matter that it gets things wrong sometimes, or does it inefficiently or makes something unmaintainable unless you use the AI again. What matters to them is they can say "take all this data here and swizzle the frobs" in their native language instead of learning a specific programming syntax and system. And they can point it at some arbitrary data in whatever format they happen to have the data in, and they have a halfway decent chance of getting something that does what they want.

It's not going to be pretty, it's not going to be perfect and it's probably going to break in subtle and unexpected ways. But as long as most of the time its mostly good enough, people will still use it enthusiastically. We're effectively looking at "worse is better" for the modern age and for people that aren't and never were going to be programmers.