For the last year I’ve been teaching people in Pursuit’s AI-Native. As I described in Build.ms: Making Technology Accessible To Everyone

I’ve been volunteering at Pursuit for 12 years — helping people from below the poverty line, with no prior background in tech, become software developers. 80% of them land jobs in tech making an average salary of $85,000/year. Former Uber drivers, janitors, and kindergarten teachers have learned technology skills to completely reshape their lives. I’ve had the great pleasure of watching hundreds of lives change right in front of my eyes, and it’s truly moving.

Given the poor job market for junior developers, the program shifted to an AI-focused approach last year. People who’ve never heard of AI are building real software and learning how to build real products in just 9 months. They put in hundreds of hours learning to build with AI, develop products, market them, and everything else you’d need to build a small business. They do this with guidance from dedicated teachers and volunteers who transform people into builders incredibly quickly.

These are incredibly dedicated people learning everything they need to thrive in an AI-centric world. They saw the opportunity a year ago and decided to jump in before most people had even heard of Claude Code.

As I wrote in Claude Cowork

Since the release of Claude Code, software developers have been living in the future. As Simon Willison puts it, developers have had access to general purpose agents for the last 11 months.

But Claude Code is finally having its moment with non-technical people who are realizing they don’t need to be technical to use it to write code. Many had assumed it would be intimidating or require a coding background, but are now discovering that AI can guide them through the parts where they’d normally get stuck.

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The Hard Fork podcast asked listeners to share how they’re using Claude Code — specifically regular people, not developers. (It starts at 36:07 in the episode if you want to listen.)

There were stories like:

• A woman who loves to read built a service where people can sign up for personal book recommendations — just for fun!
• A person whose business is selling wallpaper to interior decorators built her own wallpaper calculator. Decorators can now submit their wall sizes and get exactly how much wallpaper they need to purchase, plus a layout diagram. In her words: this was always a job I used to do by hand in Adobe Photoshop or InDesign, but now clients can do it themselves and save time for us both.
• A man who runs a CNC milling business built agents that generate leads for jobs in his local area, and even created his own MCP server to interface with his CAD software.

He also wrote a personal message to the podcast hosts:

I really want people in my demographic to understand that this isn’t “I asked ChatGPT to write an email or to generate an image that has the correct spelling.” This is different to me, I built my own business infrastructure from scratch with an AI pair programmer, despite having zero formal training and a high school education.

This is exactly what I’ve been seeing at Pursuit for the last year. People who learn to use agentic tools like Claude Code become more empowered, self-sufficient, and gain newfound autonomy to make what they need — without the technical background that was previously required.

The skill of commanding an agentic system to build something meaningful has little to do with writing code — all it requires is clarity of thought, creativity, and critical thinking skills.

This is wonderful for non-technical people — the power to create software has become dramatically more accessible. And for developers, this is worth paying attention to. People are crossing into technical domains without waiting for permission or credentials now that they can build solutions to their own problems. If you’ve considered writing code your moat, it’s worth reconsidering how quickly that’s going to change across a wide swath of domains.

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When I was starting my career, it was common to see people list Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on their resume. Today, everyone assumes you can use those (or their Google equivalents) if you’re applying for a knowledge work job.

The ability to use AI well will become the same — something your employer assumes you know how to do. Not everyone will be equally skilled at it, the same way some people are wizards with a spreadsheet while others use it as a glorified table.

That’s why I teach AI workshops — because I genuinely believe this is a key skill for the future of work — and I’ve helped unlock something in hundreds of people. And that’s why if you haven’t tried Claude Code yet — or its less technical sibling Claude Cowork — this is your moment.