Anyone Can Build: AI-Assisted Coding for Everyone

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TEC341: You don’t need to know how to code to build something useful anymore — and that shift is bigger than it sounds.

Dom Bettinelli, Jack Barruzini, and Thomas Sanjurjo dig into the world of AI-assisted coding — sometimes called “vibe coding” — where you describe what you want in plain language and tools like Codex (OpenAI) and Claude Code (Anthropic) write the actual software for you.

The panel frames this as the latest step in a long history of programming abstraction: from machine code to assembly to BASIC and Python, and now to natural language. Each layer made computing more accessible. This one may be the biggest leap yet — because it removes the need to learn a language at all.

That opens the door for anyone with strong problem-definition skills. Thomas built a working fantasy football site for his family by feeding design screenshots to Claude and getting a near-flawless CSS stylesheet in return. Jack is building iOS apps using Codex inside Xcode, keeping things aligned with Apple’s UI standards without writing Swift from scratch. Dom got further than expected on an iOS podcast app for Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World — his last real programming experience was Pascal, roughly 35 years ago.

Codex and Claude Code serve slightly different strengths: Codex behaves more like a structured, engineer-minded junior developer, while Claude Code excels at handling large amounts of context, broader reasoning, and collaborative back-and-forth. Both are improving rapidly, trading the lead every few weeks.

The deeper point the panel keeps returning to: the people who will do best with these tools are not traditional programmers. They’re the creative, flexible thinkers — people who can describe a problem clearly, stay open to unexpected solutions, and iterate. The kind of critical thinking and philosophical formation that a Catholic liberal arts education has always cultivated turns out to be exactly what AI-assisted development demands.

Practical use cases range from batch file renaming and custom spreadsheets to parish database management, prototype demos for stakeholders, and home network monitoring with a Raspberry Pi. The panel also covers where things break down — subtle bugs, AI overconfidence, and security holes — including Anthropic’s internal “Mythos” tool, reportedly so effective at finding vulnerabilities it hasn’t been released publicly.

Headlines: the Artemis 2 crew’s iPhone 17 Pro Earth-set video from lunar orbit, New Glenn’s payload delivery failure and what it means for Artemis III, and Tim Cook’s retirement as Apple CEO, with hardware chief John Ternus named his successor.

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Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.

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