With AI We're All Citizen Developers

July 16, 2025

The term "citizen developer" seems to have gone out of fashion. But the underlying idea of the citizen developer is becoming more real, more tangible, and more inevitable by the day.

Just take a look at Amazon's Kiro, a brand-new AI IDE that puts structured requirements, designs, tests, and tasks between your prompt and your code. With Kiro, you'll no longer have to write prompts that write code. Instead, you'll:

Write prompts that create requirements Review requirements to design system architecture Implement system architecture by defining tests Pass tests by assigning tasks Complete tasks by automatically generating code

You no longer need to be a pro coder to do any of that.

And that's a good thing!

The person who should be responsible for defining requirements is not the pro coder, but rather the person who knows the job best, who does the job already, and who wants to do that job better. It's the person who's rolling up their sleeves because nobody else can or will do something for them in the way that it should be done.

And who's going to be doing the prompting? Will it be certified specialists in prompt engineering? Professional prompters? Prompting consultants? Prompting Ph.D students? Pro coders who claim that they're the only ones qualified to prompt the machine?

Nope. It'll be citizen developers.

Citizen developers who understand that systems built for them were created without them. Citizen developers who aren't satisfied with how they're expected to live within the systems they've been assigned. Citizen developers who possess the tools and the desire to build better systems, designed for how we want to live.

In the early days of the automobile, you had to be a talented mechanic to drive across the United States.

Decades ago, I did it on gasoline and coffee. Today, you can do it on sunshine and autopilot.

That's wonderful for drivers -- not so much for auto mechanics.

We're undergoing a similar transition with AI-powered coding. It's going to start with little apps; then progress to bigger apps; and eventually allow people to prompt-generate their way to fully-realized enterprise systems.

And if you're a pro coder, I have good news for you -- you'll make an excellent citizen developer one day.

Here's something I wrote last year:

The "citizen soldier" in America was the capital-R Revolutionary idea of a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, you know the rest. The concept of the "citizen developer" carries its own revolutionary logic. Instead of having to rely upon professionals, mercenaries, or the beneficence of the powerful, each one of us has the power to participate in the creation of systems to compel change, not by force of arms, but through the spread of ideas. Citizen Satoshi (May 1, 2024)