10 ms·

Learning to code is still worthwhile

318 points by stevekrouse 2mo ago

piyush24rai 2mo ago
[dead]
icedata 2mo ago
I worked with Seymour Papert when he was chairman of Logo Computer Systems. Also the author (with Marvin Minsky) of Perceptrons, an early book on Neural Networks. Really ahead of his time.
dyauspitr 2mo ago
Only because the US government is putting a bar on how intelligent of a model they are willing to allow and it seems like we are already at it. China won’t stop though so it’s going to be months to a year before we get models where learning to code makes no sense.
- tcoff91 2mo ago
  I feel like no matter the model, it's going to be more powerful when used by a skilled software engineer vs a layperson.
  - dyauspitr 2mo ago
    For a little while. But we’re already at the point where a layperson can feed back errors into the LLM well enough for most apps for it to fix the problems and those are the errors it misses, it gets most of them on its own.
    - bigstrat2003 2mo ago
      We most certainly are not at that point.
- platevoltage 2mo ago
  Learning to code will never not make sense. It will never make sense to me why software engineers are so eager to make the skills they've developed over years obsolete.
wgbowley 2mo ago
Man, that makes coding tools, says you should learn to code lolz. I don't disagree. Just worth noting.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
gonzalohm 2mo ago
Learning anything is worthwhile. Just because you code in Python it doesn't mean that knowing how instructions are processed in a CPU or the memory is managed is useless. The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses Abstractions always led to this sort of behavior. So many of my web development peers screamed at me for being curious about what happens behind/further down then the stack we were learning, and this was decades ago. Seems it differs a lot per person, and what I've found out only later, depending on the situation; nowadays I'm comfortable with both approaches of "this is below the abstraction I actually care about" and "No, I have to dive deeper to actually understand properly the abstraction level I'm at right now"
  - coupdejarnac 2mo ago
    Abstractions are one thing, not putting any effort into learning is another. People worry about the latter.
    - gonzalohm 2mo ago
      Exactly. I'm not saying that you should go back to code in assembly. But, come on, you can surely dedicate 30 minutes of your time to read how a CPU works... Just have curiosity would be my advice
      - fragmede 2mo ago
        At the expense of what, though? That's 30 minutes not spent learning about the business, or talking to customers, or to your kids. Or watching the World Cup. Or reading Hacker News.
bix6 2mo ago
There’s always value in the fundamentals you just might not get paid for them.
OhSoHumble 2mo ago
> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music Something I'm trying to do right now is to build something and avoid using LLMs to write any code. I still use it to consult. I'm writing a Dota2 tournament match aggregator in Elixir that takes tournament streams and chronologically orders them in a format that makes it easier to watch them sequentially since I find YouTube hard to use for ingesting series of videos. I'm building it because... I like programming. I like making things. I find that LLMs are making me intellectually lazy and making things with them feels unfulfilling. I want to build. It's human to want to build.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > I want to build. It's human to want to build. Anything a human feels is human, regardless if it's to build or to not build :) Some people prefer some ways of building, others in other ways, it's all fine. I think lots of people forget that programming is a heavily creative endeavor in the end. If I wanted to be slightly controversial, I'd argue building a program is more like painting a painting than building a bridge, for better and worse.
  - brewtide 2mo ago
    Interesting you bring up (artistic) painting and bridge building. I'm a house painter, and while the work is... It's just relentless work and staring all day. It's the end results of making something just, better, with the simple acts of reputation and giving a shit about it. Just wondering where house painter falls in your scale, I'd hunch.
    - gpm 2mo ago
      Not the person you're replying to, but I'd agree with them, and think house painting would be basically identical to building a bridge. The difference this comparison is capturing in my opinion is that of thinking up something new, compared to arranging things in a well known/already defined configuration. We know how to build bridges, we just have to do it (maybe including some calculations and site surveys, yes, but novel solutions are rightfully shunned). Similarly painting a house. Developing software is practically definitionally creating a novel thing. If we wanted the same software over again we could literally copy and paste the existing executable (and we do that all the time, it's just not called developing software or enough work to be a job, since we have machines that are excellent at arranging the electrical charge in the pre-defined manner). The actually-a-job* software equivalent of painting a house or building a bridge would be weaving a program into core rope memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory * Not a job you can get anymore.
jdw64 2mo ago
Learning itself still has value. Just because my arms and legs are shorter than others doesn't mean I should cut them off. Just because an LLM can do most things better than I can doesn't mean I should stop learning. Also, whether the LLM's knowledge is suited for humans is a separate issue. This isn't limited to coding—all fields of study are ultimately humanity's process of understanding the world, and it's participating in that historical process that has been passed down from our ancestors. I think the idea that something has or doesn't have value just because an LLM exists is purely a capitalistic perspective. I sincerely question whether something that doesn't generate money in a capitalist sense is truly without value
- specproc 2mo ago
  Just because I have a car doesn't mean I should stop walking.
preommr 2mo ago
The problem is that coding was sold as the pancea. If you were fired, "learn to code", if you're in prison, "learn to code", if you're in kindergarden, "learn to code". Even in this article, it's talking about how it's a good way to learn math and formal thinking. Yea, as an application. If you want to learn math, learn some basic fundamentals tied specifically to math, and then come apply it to code. Coding is like welding in that it's a useful skill, a craft unto itself, but also integral for modern day manufacturing that opens up a world of possibilities. You don't see welding being suggested as a form of excercise, or the ticket to being a multi-millionaire.
holtkam2 2mo ago
If you want to fully understand / contribute to / fully leverage the most powerful technology humanity has ever devised (AI), you must learn to read and write code. That’s the only reason anyone should need.
avaer 2mo ago
Those are not compelling arguments. If the best we've got for convincing people to learn to code is that it's like math notation (the most hated part of math for the uninitiated), or pretty like a violin (useless for a new grad), then coding is in serious trouble. IMO a better argument is it helps you "think like a computer". But if you wanted to learn that there are many video games I'd recommend mastering instead of learning to code. For most people "learn to code" is like telling programmers to "learn asm". (I've been coding ~30 years)
- altruios 2mo ago
  The most compelling reason to learn to code is exactly the same reason to read lots of books (fiction or otherwise). It exercises your brain. A brain that can easily sort, parse, and understand basic logic and control flow is more resistant to propaganda and influence. Which is the same benefit a lot of reading does, but for different avenues of thinking (more worldviews exposed to -> more critical thought of each of those views -> more critical thinking in general).
  - em-bee 2mo ago
    learning lots of different games would achieve the same objective.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    But that in itself also isn't compelling to lots of people, why should they care about "exercising your brain"? I do it because it's fun, probably the most common reason I do anything, or because it feels nice. But probably exercising my brain for me is fun and makes me feel nice, this isn't true for everyone, sadly.
    - altruios 2mo ago
      Besides the reward of a more capable brain, the reduced effects/risks of dementia, the contrarian need to argue, the altruistic desire to help neighbors with difficult problems, the selfish urge to daydream... yeah, there are people for whom none of those are motivating factors.
somesortofthing 2mo ago
I think pieces like this miss the forest for the trees. Software is the bottleneck for a vast array of economic activities. Attention from intelligent people is most of the rest. Both are mostly-commoditized already and are just waiting around for technological diffusion and the closing of the RSI loop. Unless you're doing so as a hobby with no expectation of returns, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth learning anymore.
- PessimalDecimal 2mo ago
  Lots of unsubstantiated claims here
- abc_lisper 2mo ago
  I don't know how one would build anything without knowing. If it was true, I would be building a competitor to Anthropic right now.
  - Madmallard 2mo ago
    I mean only people with billions of dollars can make competitors to anthropic because of necessary compute costs that's the barrier to entry
    - davidpapermill 2mo ago
      Only people with billions of dollars can train foundation models, yes. But a competitor to Anthropic at the product level? With open source models, very little barrier.
  - somesortofthing 2mo ago
    You build without knowing by delegating to a system that extrapolates what it knows about you and what you want, and is able to execute on that to deliver faster, better, and more completely than you ever could. You'll live as a ball of intent and values, observing in wonder as everything you desire springs up around you before you know you want it. You could choose not to live like this of course, but it would be like driving a DIY go-kart on the highway - you'll fall behind and get in others' way, and the rest of society will treat you accordingly. That's the optimistic case, anyway.
sublinear 2mo ago
I don't entirely disagree, but I absolutely hate these blog posts. They always miss the point entirely. It's been enough years of this that it seems like a deliberate muddying of waters. "Knowing how to code" has always been poorly defined and full of silly arguments. Nobody employs code monkeys. What matters more is that you understand how things work. There's zero progress on that with AI. LLMs might even be negative progress on education.
- appleappleapple 2mo ago
  >Nobody hires code monkeys. Respectfully disagree here. People have always hired code monkeys and arguably they will hire more of them as engineers become increasingly able to defer their judgment to LLMs. It might be true that the top level companies expect strong mental models of the code but in my experience many companies (especially startups) really just want the 0->1 ability and don’t care how you get there.
psadri 2mo ago
Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc. All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  Steve Jobs used to say that everyone should learn to program, because it teaches you how to think. https://youtu.be/BRTOlPdyPYU https://youtu.be/BRTOlPdyPYU
  - steve_adams_86 2mo ago
    Lately I wonder if people should learn philosophy because it teaches you how to reason, what to reason about, and why. Just like with programming, you’re constantly forced to interrogate your impressions and reconsider what you took for granted. It’s an extremely useful exercise. Nothing will show you how wrong you constantly are like testing the logic of a program you wrote. It’s a bit like learning to program, but without a compiler as the referee or the domain constraints. Maybe that’s where we should put more energy if learning to think is the goal, though I don’t know what could replace the purely logical and verifiable qualities of programming. That isn’t so readily available with philosophy, for better or worse. We do need people to practice thinking and self-interrogation far more than we do today.
    - al_borland 2mo ago
      > We do need people to practice thinking and self-interrogation far more than we do today. I think a lot of people are turning to AI for this, which can be dangerous if they haven’t already developed these critical thinking skills.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- snek_case 2mo ago
wasting_time 2mo ago
The era of LLMs is similar to when Magic was discovered in the 1400s. The layperson may be able to get ahold of a spellbook, but without Understanding it comes with high risk of turning your niece into a frog. Whereas Wizards can cast increasingly powerful spells that build on each other, and make Art.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Knowing someone's true name in the wizarding world meant to hold power over them. Though if you know someone's account name on Reddit or only fans or Snapchat, it's kind of the same thing.
- NuclearPM 2mo ago
  I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
  - codazoda 2mo ago
    I think he’s wasting time.
    - NonHyloMorph 2mo ago
      Well good for him
  - layman51 2mo ago
    I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too. Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselves crazy by chatting with an LLM, but with divination, I heard it can cause distress to ask the same questions about yourself many too frequently and also they ask about outcomes instead of methods.
    - 2mo ago
hahooh 2mo ago
it sounds like backing up any learning... not just coding
MrLeap 2mo ago
To create things via AI without being able to comprehend the output is to trust completely in the agent(s). Operating that way is more optimistic than experience has taught me to be.
p1necone 2mo ago
Anecdotally, the people who I know who were not particularly good developers pre-llms still manage to produce bad code even using flagship models now. I think having solid knowledge/understanding of good architecture and general practices is still crucial, and it's easy to forget that the foundational knowledge and instinct you take for granted now actually took a lot of time and effort to learn when you were less experienced.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- llama052 2mo ago
  100% this. I observe this all the time. LLMs can be a force multiplier but those who don’t ask the right questions or understand the nuance still produce bad code, it’s just amplified. I don’t think any of the current models can avoid that, especially when it’s based on data it’s been fed, which is historically human generated.
  - tetha 2mo ago
    And interestingly, a few good people at work are learning faster with the LLMs at hand. To a degree, it looks like LLMs help them overcome the blank page anxiety and help them with the grunt work of, well, actually writing code, which actually contains a lot of technical nuances to keep track of. But once that's down, I'm having very good discussions with them on what makes good, maintainable and sustainable code bases. It's almost like the old writing advice my Mark Twain: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” It's easier to dislike a part of something existing and fix that, than trying to create the perfect thing at once.
adamddev1 2mo ago
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't AI agents replacing the coding mostly being done on the outer layers of development? I mean, end user applications, apps, dashboards, business applications? On this "outer crust" people can maybe tolerate things with 99% accuracy, or bloated code. A vibe coded app can be argued to be "good enough." (Even then, look at the disaster that Microsoft apps have become post AI adoption.) But people are still staying away from LLMs on the critical compilers, frameworks, tools and libraries that people need to really rely on. No one wants to build on code that is 99% accurate or bloated. No one wants to use an AI coded web browser. To really build good building materials, you need to code it and know what you're doing. Where is anybody even getting close to phasing out coding in those critical areas?
- em-bee 2mo ago
  doesn't the recent bun controversy tell a different story?
  - adamddev1 2mo ago
    exactly, it seems like people run away when a tool becomes heavily AI developed.
- bad_haircut72 2mo ago
  This type of comment retroactively assigns human written code a quality which it has never had. "No one wants to build on code that is 99% accurate or bloated" - my friend have you ever used Windows??
  - forgetfreeman 2mo ago
    While there are certainly more examples than either of us can count of shitty half-baked codebases claiming quality code has never existed is pretty wild. With humans it's at least something to be aspired to and occasionally even accomplished.
  - adamddev1 2mo ago
    Of course Windows is garbage. But this is the sort of defeatist argument that always shows up among both AI optimists and places where corruption is rampant. Corruption and incorrectness is established as an inescapable baseline, and then greater systematic corruption (like LLMs producing constantly sub-par code) is justified.
Rover222 2mo ago
"Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music" Um no, you've gone too far.
- em-bee 2mo ago
  i recommend you look at the demo scene for a counter argument.
- dd8601fn 2mo ago
  I'm no Mozart, but I find it really fucking weird when we act like woodworking is artful and creating software isn't.
  - Ampersander 2mo ago
    Programmers do woodworking in their free time and programming at the assembly line in the crud factory.
  - Rover222 2mo ago
    Sounds like you have no artistic sensibility
- jplusequalt 2mo ago
  Roller Coaster Tycoon was programmed in fucking assembly. That's a work of artistry right there.
  - Rover222 2mo ago
    Calling it as rich as the best works of literature is peak programmer angst.
    - jplusequalt 2mo ago
      Trying to compare apples to oranges is peak idiocy.
Dumblydorr 2mo ago
Thin post with more ads for their company than arguments. Many pursuits are worthwhile, yet almost no one does most pursuits. Coding is going to become a niche activity like portrait painting or making toys. It’s fun but there’s far cheaper easier ways to get a superior product.
- MeetingsBrowser 2mo ago
  Driving schools will shut down within the year because self driving cars will be prevalent
- stevekrouse 2mo ago
  Ah damn, sorry about that. I removed my footer "ads" in response to this feedback. Appreciate it.
librasteve 2mo ago
<<And finally, programming is simply fun. It's a joy. My calling in life is to spread the joy of programming,>> must be a Raku coder -Ofun
hollowturtle 2mo ago
The very fact we need to discuss that it's a sign that we lost and slop has won. Learning to code it's a journey that never ends, after almost 15+ years I feel like I still learn and that my code sucks, if I delegate everything to the slot machine I feel like I'm being retro actively turned into a junior, thanks but no thanks. I'll still use LLMs and Agents the best I can but coding is mine
- platevoltage 2mo ago
  I have this mindset too. I use LLMs too, but strictly as a helper. nothing goes in my code that I don't understand, or that doesn't follow the style of the rest of the project. It's a great research tool, although I can already feel my documentation reading skills diminishing slightly.
seanclayton 2mo ago
Who in the world has time to learn how to code? Who has that much copious free time when they're working two jobs?
- Jtsummers 2mo ago
  > Who has that much copious free time when they're working two jobs? Only two jobs? You'll need a better reason than that.
ekidd 2mo ago
As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they were junior contributors.
- Animats 2mo ago
  > As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Not wrong. Probably. I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint. She never obtained an academic appointment. She never found a job that needed those skills. She died alone a few years ago. That may be the fate of many programmers.
  - tkocmathla 2mo ago
    > I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint. This sounds to me like a life well lived!
  - alightsoul 2mo ago
    If I have learned something is that people in this field of work highly underestimate their skills. I still remember when people said gpt 3.5 was the end of programming and that I shouldn't pursue it. I am so glad I took the risk anyway. Although things are much brighter outside the us and Europe https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report exactly the same countries where ai is mostly seen as unacceptable.
ohadkr 2mo ago
[flagged]
bigstrat2003 2mo ago
Even if you want to use an LLM (which you probably shouldn't, but it's your life), you best know how to program if you want to make anything good. They suck at programming, and need a human to guide them.
KashifNY 2mo ago
With everyday bringing new developments in the world, a lot of skills that used to be in demand are being replaced with new age tools. This has been the case in many industries and its evolving. The last 6 years have reshaped the world as we know it very aggressively and the best we can do is flow and adapt to the new times
assimpleaspossi 2mo ago
Coding is easy. It's the programming that's hard. I'm glad I'm a programmer and not just a coder. Just like Hemingway was a writer and not just a stenographer or typist.
VariousPrograms 2mo ago
It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail. The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".
- brewtide 2mo ago
  Where do these new top notch programmers come from and what proof of top notchness will be required for job proof? (Honest questions)
  - confidantlake 2mo ago
    MIT. A degree from MIT. Kind of joking but not really.
- goda90 2mo ago
  Here's an alternative farming analogy: knowing how to program(and adjacent skills) is like understanding plant biology, climate, food demand, supply chains etc. Code generators are like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Powerful stuff. Lots of production. Solved some big problems. But we're seeing new problems like soil depletion, runoff, decreased nutrition and knock-on effects like obesity. To solve those problems will take lots of people with the right skills, not people ignorantly using the fertilizers and pesticides according to the profit driven manufacturers instructions.
jknoepfler 2mo ago
Note that every single person telling you to not learn to code currently knows how to code, often at an expert level, and is therefore capable of reasoning about code. I learned to build such useless things as operating systems, databases and neural nets from scratch. That knowledge is foundational to my ability today to lead technical teams effectively, even in the era of copilot. I would absolutely not hire an engineer who could not code. Don't get me wrong, I don't need code monkeys any more than I need assembly experts. I need engineers who have experience building, tuning and maintaining complex software. Someone who can't code can't crack open what they're working on and reason about it in a meaningful way. That's a huge liability. Also like... they just haven't ever done that work before. I don't even know if they're going to be capable of it. I did some consulting a few years ago to convert startup codebases from Ruby on Rails to something that "would scale". Some of the projects I opened up were beyond comical. Millions and millions of dollars of investor capital burned torturing cut-rate junior engineers to get them to make a product-shaped solutions that could not be maintained, could not be scaled, could not be modified without everything breaking... entire teams of cheerful idiots who were replaceable with a single capable senior engineer who knew what they were actually doing. It was just tragic. Literal futures burned up as friction with reality, because neither the founder nor their engineers could write actual code to build clean, scalable systems without tripping over their own feet. You're signing future engineers up to be those utterly lackluster juniors for the rest of their lives. Stay in school kids. Learn to code.
glouwbug 2mo ago
I mean, iteration and interaction builds your understanding which verifies and validates what you built. Relying on agents without formal validation is like saying a tree fell in the forest
kittikitti 2mo ago
Perhaps coding will be optional rather than a requirement for the most in-demand tech jobs. But for roles including AI Engineer, someone who knows how to code will have a premium over an AI Engineer that only vibes. While the peak of "learning to code" is surely in the past, there is resentment (at least in my personal experience) that's fueling the "anti-learning to code". Personally, it was very frustrating when learning how to program and I gave up many times before finally getting it. In general, when people cannot obtain competence in a certain area, they tend to disregard the importance of it to shield their ego. What's going on now in corporate are nasty politics because people who decided not to learn to code seek that the skill is disregarded entirely and even mocked.
taybin 2mo ago
> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.
- prettyblocks 2mo ago
  Yes, if you're just going down a list of jira tickets and implementing product features, but for many folks it's also an art medium.
  - alightsoul 2mo ago
    It's like the purpose of portraits before photographs were invented. Maybe ai is like the camera for the photograph, and the canvas for portraits is writing code.
- tempest_ 2mo ago
  I make this comparison a lot and a lot of devs don't like it. I am sure I could make a decent industrial PLC tech, same shit, different tools.
- yowlingcat 2mo ago
  I kinda like the music comparison because it's so rich with sociological analogues. You have the gear snobs who can't stop buying more premium gear but never sit down and write anything. The kids who pick up a copy of Garageband and put together hits with their natural talent, sense of taste and and interesting story to tell. Soundtrack and videogame composers who have hybrid instincts of session musicians and architects. Avant garde musicians who you're never fully sure of whether they're playing a joke you're in on (or on you) and that's kinda the point. Music critics who have never played or written music a day in their life and yet end up becoming arbiters (or more accurately, delegates) of taste. Fandom stans and ringleaders who absorb it as an identity and run extraordinarily well organized cults with an iron fist. You can probably find correlates here with coding and AI any which way you look. Coding is so rich that you can use it to do artistic, creative pursuits because it really is an interactive and world building medium if you want it to be. And it can also be a practical, reliable machine that helps you get useful business objectives done. And anywhere in between! Perhaps the author is indexing on the former because there's an intrinsic value to that, and intrinsic values seem to be quite drowned out by the noise of extrinsic values in this media supercycle. But I don't think it'll be that way forever. Whenever things get too noisy, people have a way of seeking peace and quiet.
tibbar 2mo ago
I was quite worried about having to code when I interviewed recently. A two- or three- year layoff is a lot. Turns out that it didn't really make much difference! After a few weeks of warm-up exercises, coding was as natural as ever and turned out to be the easier part of technical assessments. I guess a couple decades of muscle memory is hard to lose. Now then, back to using Fable. It is doing work that previously took me months in an evening.
h4kunamata 2mo ago
A few years from now after the AI hype has cooled down (it has already started), where will be two types of people: 1. The ones who use AI for everything and therefore, are unable to think on their own, unable to make decisions on their own, and everything in between. Looking for a job will be fun because their skills now depend on AI dependency rather than skill. 2. The ones who use AI as tool and therefore, are still able to do things on their own, make decisions on their own. Looking for a job will be just another Tuesday in the office, and were are already seeing companies hiring them back to replace AI.
politician 2mo ago
Well this is ridiculous. Literature or music?! No, learning to code is still worthwhile because the AI cannot do useful abstraction well at all. If you don't know how to code, then you'll fail to build useful tools and useful reusable components that can (a) further accelerate your development speed, and (b) reduce token spend.
grandimam 2mo ago
I have always found similarities between programming and filmmaking. Programmer being the director and the LLM being the entire apparatus upon which the film/software is built. This became evident to me while doing spec-driven development for a few of my projects where I specify the constraints upon which the software should be build, but have limited control over the performance similar to how a director has limited control over an actor's performance.
pophenat 2mo ago
If you can’t code, you’ll be like a mathematician or statistician who can’t do basic math because they have tools that can do it for them. We don’t tell kids they don’t need to know how to do basic math operations because they have Excel and calculators.
joka88xj 2mo ago
[flagged]
infinitebit 2mo ago
Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra? Probably not, because they *don’t exist because learning basic math is necessary to learn higher level math*. Whether or not we have calculators to do basic math is irrelevant if you want to become a mathematician. I’d argue that “whether or not the average dev will be writing any code by hand in 5 years” is irrelevant to whether or not one should learn to code *if they want to master designing and building complex software* using whatever method they will be using.
- HNisCIS 2mo ago
  I take the opposite view but to the same conclusion. I've heard the joke "the more advanced you get the worse you get at math" from a lot of mathematicians. I'd bet most mathematicians can't do a long division problem without having to think pretty hard about it, because they've long since moved past that skill. All that said, people still learn and do manual math at all levels in order to advance the field even though calculators and python notebooks exist. I think people get too wrapped up in LLMs being the entirety of the future when the LLMs themselves are entirely a product of the past. An LLM is less a thinking machine than a lossy JPEG for language and to an extent, knowledge represented in language. As such, if you want to expand the field and move into the future you aren't going to rely solely on an algorithm that reverts to the mean.
  - david_rugaex 2mo ago
    I'm in the same boat! It's a reasonable stance but the specific examples aren't air tight. I'm a Mathematician and I can't do long division, I could probably work it out? Like you say, long division was part of a journey that made me very mathematically capable, even if it's no longer an active contributor. My capacity for pencil and paper calculus is undoubtably many many fold worse than my peak around undergraduate studies!
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    I think a major difference between math and software development is that software development tends to get easier after one gets through the educational barrier to entry, whereas math (and many other topics) become more complex/puzzly. Something that could highly accurately revert to the mean would be insanely useful when the overwhelming majority of what you're doing is mundane and has been done a million times before - the analog of something like basic arithmetic or calculus. Take for instance most CRUD apps. They're all doing basically the same stuff just with variations on interface/schema. And that's a huge chunk of all professional software development. We're already at the point where you can describe said schema/interface and get a pretty good implementation of it, and things will likely continue to only get better. I think the job-apocalypse is unlikely, but I also think it's unlikely that 'manual coding' will be anywhere near as significant a part of the economy in the future as it is today.
gyulai 2mo ago
I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. The practical question for someone planning out their career from todays' point of view, is that it's uncertain when that time will come, and these markets can and will stay irrational for longer than any single individual trying to resist them will be able to stay solvent.
- piyush24rai 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- palmotea 2mo ago
  > ...and [1] codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and [2] LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. [3] At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. You are a very optimistic person. IMHO, claims #1 & #2 will happen, but #3 won't. People, especially business leaders, will just adjust their expectations downwards (or be forced to do so). Just think of how often some "new and improved version" drops some important feature you used without providing a good replacement? We'll get more of that. If the codebase is unmaintainable, they'll just regenerate a new pile of garbage that will change stuff randomly and call it an improvement.
  - pydry 2mo ago
    We've been on this merry go round before with the "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" boom. That slopfest ended with a new executive dogma of "hire only the best programmers" as so many of those projects were humiliating disasters which had to be junked. I do not think that was coincidental. Executive fashions can remain remarkably consistent and irrational for years as they try to make reality conform to their expectations before doing a complete 180.
HNisCIS 2mo ago
Here's a much simpler reason: the output of an LLM, mathematically, is average. The code it writes is, effectively, the geometric mean of github. The ideas it comes up with are the geometric mean of wikipedia and reddit. Go ask it how to do something truly "out there" and watch it give you the most milquetoast reply you've ever seen. I asked Fable 5 to create a profitable business and the best it could come up with was: >Sell an expensive, recurring B2B service into your network, fulfill it with technical leverage, then productize it into software once you've done the same work five times. Yeah, good fucking work, nobody's ever thought of that. It's obvious why it picked that though, every 3rd post on this forum and half of the rest of the internet is singing the praises of be-your-own-boss SaaS passive income and it turns out that if you convolve all of that into a black box this is what you're gonna get.
elestor 2mo ago
Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think - Steve Jobs
- 4gotunameagain 2mo ago
  It teaches you a very specific way of thinking, albeit a useful one.
- xikxp1 2mo ago
  Everybody should learn to program a computer, so we could hire the best to build our products. That's what he wanted to say. If he really meant what he said, he'd took some effort to learn himself
robpus 2mo ago
[flagged]
Alien1Being 2mo ago
Learning Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is also worthwhile. Like learning a programming language, these activities stretch your mind in different ways. And expose you to a different kind of beauty and a very different world.
- kypro 2mo ago
  > Learning Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is also worthwhile. In what sense? From this perspective everything is worthwhile. If "worthwhile" is relative to learning other skills then Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is near the bottom of that pile, and you probably know what which is why you cited them. So then the question is where coding sits on that hierarchy, and if someone should learn to code vs acquiring other skills. Personally I'd not advise anyone to learn to code today. It's not just that I'm not convinced of the utility of the skill going forward, but I also think it's very hard to actually learn to code competently for someone starting out today. I had the luxury of spending decades coding without LLMs professionally. No one learning today is realistically going to have the opportunity to compete with old school coders with decades of experience writing code by hand, even if we assume the skill will be worth anything.
  - tanker_war 2mo ago
    Surely you're capable of understanding that the term "worthwhile" has multiple meanings.
    - kypro 2mo ago
      Yes, I'm not sure it was clear, but that was largely my point – to say it's "worthwhile" as a flat statement probably doesn't capture the nuance. It's obviously going to be worthwhile in some sense as almost all skills are worthwhile to some degree. But normally when we're talking about whether something is worthwhile to learn we're weighing up other competing things we could be learning instead. In that sense I think it's far more debatable about whether coding is worthwhile to learn.
  - robocat 2mo ago
inigyou 2mo ago
Nothing is worthwhile if we all die in the end...
mishonyAI 2mo ago
[dead]
bogrollben 2mo ago
The arguments put forward are very weak, in my opinion. It made me depressed, not hopeful, as in: if this is all we have left, things are becoming desperate indeed. To elaborate, if coding is like art, it's the worst art there is. It's far closer to something like legos and the satisfaction you get from completing a noteworthy build. Maybe that's the writer's point - yes it's still worthwhile, in a purely hobbyist sort of way. I find the "coding helps math" argument to be similarly weak. Yes, it certainly helps with algebra, but overall I would argue the coding flavor of math largely helps more coding type of math. It's a strange type of math with loops and rules and conditionals that wouldn't be mainstream if software wasn't so mainstream to begin with. When you pull back the covers, the argument sounds more circular than something with true meat on the bones.
elzbardico 2mo ago
Sometimes I think that I must be a complete low IQ imbecile, because for me, even using Fable, code is still a pretty much hands-on affair. Not in the sense of actually writing lines of code (I still like to create things like structs, interfaces, traits, as a form of prompting, natural language for that kind of stuff is actually more verbose and way less precise). But I hate waste, I hate dead code, I hate byzantine constructions and reinventing the wheel, and thus, most of the time, I keep a close eye on reasoning traces, frequently interrupt and steer the agent, and prefer to review the diffs as they are done in very small increments. And everytime I am lazy, and try to just vibe code stuff, inevitably the old "all abstractions are leaky" adage rear its ugly head and I see myself reviewing a fucking giant delta and asking the agent: "but, why? when you could just..." It is not possible that all those famous people are wrong and I am right. If my results when giving full autonomy to an agent are usually sub-optimal under my point of view, well, what if the problem is with MY point of view? I am starting to get depressed thinking that maybe I have some personality flaw that will prevent me from truly reaping the fruits of this new age. At one side I think it is absurdly fantastic that I have this pair programmer so productive and with fantastic recall, but on the other side, I can't really relinquish control, I feel like it can't build a coherent architecture, I am still attached to the idea that engineering principles like low coupling, information hiding, high cohesion, low cyclomatic complexity, modularity, sound typing are important, and maybe I am just a fucking old curmudgeon that can't get up with the times.
- wes-k 2mo ago
  There’s a huge difference between does it work vs is it elegant. As a software engineer I have been strict on making sure my code is elegant. Vibe coding has switched me to product (and project) manager. Why would I care about what the code looks like? Does it work!? Does it do what I want? Does the app have the right UI and UX? These are my concerns now. I rarely look at the output code.
deleted 2mo ago
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agentultra 2mo ago
Coding does not inherently have the “precision” of mathematics. If you’ve ever tried to formally verify even a basic algorithm you’ll know how “loose” programs are with their specifications. If you end up down this route you’ll gain an appreciation for a branch of mathematics that has spent most of its history maligned by the wider community. I too finally started grokking trigonometry and calculus in high school thanks much due to programming. I don’t think it’s the best entry point for mathematics though. Us programmers tend to bias its effect on our learning and appreciation. For most people programming is tedious, cryptic, and frustrating. It doesn’t aid understanding mathematics if you can’t even use it. Maths is beautiful on its own. And so is programming. I think it’s still worthwhile because for all that these systems can do it still takes an experienced human to drive them. Any positive results are due to a human understanding the training data, the system, and importantly the output. You can’t one-shot a production grade C compiler or OS with these tools and never will be able to without over fitting the model. You need to know what a production grade C compiler requires in order to generate one using tools like this. So keep learning. Mainly because it suits you, benefits you, and you like doing it.
ozgrakkurt 2mo ago
This “don’t need to learn code” vibe will bring a big quality and good pay wave programming. It was getting more obnoxious because of more and more mba guys getting into programming because there is money in it. Hopefully this will act as an effective filter against money people so they can keep going into law or w/e else they believe there is money
ilpapayon 2mo ago
It has always been.
jasmar 2mo ago
Correction: Learning to software engineer is still worthwhile
unjuno 2mo ago
[flagged]
Ferret7446 2mo ago
What is "learn to code"? Is it learning the syntax of a programming language? Is it learning CS fundamentals? Is it learning OS fundamentals? Is it learning common tools and libraries? Is it learning programming paradigms? Is it learning how to read and debug code? Is it learning Java boilerplate? Is it learning an esoteric sequence of keystrokes to perform an edit in vim? That last one I think has definitely been superceded by LLMs, and I say this as an ed user.

318 points by stevekrouse 2mo ago

[dead]

I worked with Seymour Papert when he was chairman of Logo Computer Systems. Also the author (with Marvin Minsky) of Perceptrons, an early book on Neural Networks. Really ahead of his time.

dyauspitr 2mo ago

Only because the US government is putting a bar on how intelligent of a model they are willing to allow and it seems like we are already at it. China won’t stop though so it’s going to be months to a year before we get models where learning to code makes no sense.

tcoff91 2mo ago
I feel like no matter the model, it's going to be more powerful when used by a skilled software engineer vs a layperson.
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  For a little while. But we’re already at the point where a layperson can feed back errors into the LLM well enough for most apps for it to fix the problems and those are the errors it misses, it gets most of them on its own.
  - bigstrat2003 2mo ago
    We most certainly are not at that point.
platevoltage 2mo ago
Learning to code will never not make sense. It will never make sense to me why software engineers are so eager to make the skills they've developed over years obsolete.

wgbowley 2mo ago

Man, that makes coding tools, says you should learn to code lolz. I don't disagree. Just worth noting.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

gonzalohm 2mo ago

Learning anything is worthwhile. Just because you code in Python it doesn't mean that knowing how instructions are processed in a CPU or the memory is managed is useless. The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> The excuse that we don't need to know how things work because AI will take care of it is going to bite a lot of people on their asses Abstractions always led to this sort of behavior. So many of my web development peers screamed at me for being curious about what happens behind/further down then the stack we were learning, and this was decades ago. Seems it differs a lot per person, and what I've found out only later, depending on the situation; nowadays I'm comfortable with both approaches of "this is below the abstraction I actually care about" and "No, I have to dive deeper to actually understand properly the abstraction level I'm at right now"
- coupdejarnac 2mo ago
  Abstractions are one thing, not putting any effort into learning is another. People worry about the latter.
  - gonzalohm 2mo ago
    Exactly. I'm not saying that you should go back to code in assembly. But, come on, you can surely dedicate 30 minutes of your time to read how a CPU works... Just have curiosity would be my advice
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      At the expense of what, though? That's 30 minutes not spent learning about the business, or talking to customers, or to your kids. Or watching the World Cup. Or reading Hacker News.

bix6 2mo ago

There’s always value in the fundamentals you just might not get paid for them.

OhSoHumble 2mo ago

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music Something I'm trying to do right now is to build something and avoid using LLMs to write any code. I still use it to consult. I'm writing a Dota2 tournament match aggregator in Elixir that takes tournament streams and chronologically orders them in a format that makes it easier to watch them sequentially since I find YouTube hard to use for ingesting series of videos. I'm building it because... I like programming. I like making things. I find that LLMs are making me intellectually lazy and making things with them feels unfulfilling. I want to build. It's human to want to build.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> I want to build. It's human to want to build. Anything a human feels is human, regardless if it's to build or to not build :) Some people prefer some ways of building, others in other ways, it's all fine. I think lots of people forget that programming is a heavily creative endeavor in the end. If I wanted to be slightly controversial, I'd argue building a program is more like painting a painting than building a bridge, for better and worse.
- brewtide 2mo ago
  Interesting you bring up (artistic) painting and bridge building. I'm a house painter, and while the work is... It's just relentless work and staring all day. It's the end results of making something just, better, with the simple acts of reputation and giving a shit about it. Just wondering where house painter falls in your scale, I'd hunch.
  - gpm 2mo ago
    Not the person you're replying to, but I'd agree with them, and think house painting would be basically identical to building a bridge. The difference this comparison is capturing in my opinion is that of thinking up something new, compared to arranging things in a well known/already defined configuration. We know how to build bridges, we just have to do it (maybe including some calculations and site surveys, yes, but novel solutions are rightfully shunned). Similarly painting a house. Developing software is practically definitionally creating a novel thing. If we wanted the same software over again we could literally copy and paste the existing executable (and we do that all the time, it's just not called developing software or enough work to be a job, since we have machines that are excellent at arranging the electrical charge in the pre-defined manner). The actually-a-job* software equivalent of painting a house or building a bridge would be weaving a program into core rope memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory * Not a job you can get anymore.

jdw64 2mo ago

Learning itself still has value. Just because my arms and legs are shorter than others doesn't mean I should cut them off. Just because an LLM can do most things better than I can doesn't mean I should stop learning. Also, whether the LLM's knowledge is suited for humans is a separate issue. This isn't limited to coding—all fields of study are ultimately humanity's process of understanding the world, and it's participating in that historical process that has been passed down from our ancestors. I think the idea that something has or doesn't have value just because an LLM exists is purely a capitalistic perspective. I sincerely question whether something that doesn't generate money in a capitalist sense is truly without value

specproc 2mo ago
Just because I have a car doesn't mean I should stop walking.

preommr 2mo ago

The problem is that coding was sold as the pancea. If you were fired, "learn to code", if you're in prison, "learn to code", if you're in kindergarden, "learn to code". Even in this article, it's talking about how it's a good way to learn math and formal thinking. Yea, as an application. If you want to learn math, learn some basic fundamentals tied specifically to math, and then come apply it to code. Coding is like welding in that it's a useful skill, a craft unto itself, but also integral for modern day manufacturing that opens up a world of possibilities. You don't see welding being suggested as a form of excercise, or the ticket to being a multi-millionaire.

holtkam2 2mo ago

If you want to fully understand / contribute to / fully leverage the most powerful technology humanity has ever devised (AI), you must learn to read and write code. That’s the only reason anyone should need.

avaer 2mo ago

Those are not compelling arguments. If the best we've got for convincing people to learn to code is that it's like math notation (the most hated part of math for the uninitiated), or pretty like a violin (useless for a new grad), then coding is in serious trouble. IMO a better argument is it helps you "think like a computer". But if you wanted to learn that there are many video games I'd recommend mastering instead of learning to code. For most people "learn to code" is like telling programmers to "learn asm". (I've been coding ~30 years)

altruios 2mo ago
The most compelling reason to learn to code is exactly the same reason to read lots of books (fiction or otherwise). It exercises your brain. A brain that can easily sort, parse, and understand basic logic and control flow is more resistant to propaganda and influence. Which is the same benefit a lot of reading does, but for different avenues of thinking (more worldviews exposed to -> more critical thought of each of those views -> more critical thinking in general).
- em-bee 2mo ago
  learning lots of different games would achieve the same objective.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  But that in itself also isn't compelling to lots of people, why should they care about "exercising your brain"? I do it because it's fun, probably the most common reason I do anything, or because it feels nice. But probably exercising my brain for me is fun and makes me feel nice, this isn't true for everyone, sadly.
  - altruios 2mo ago
    Besides the reward of a more capable brain, the reduced effects/risks of dementia, the contrarian need to argue, the altruistic desire to help neighbors with difficult problems, the selfish urge to daydream... yeah, there are people for whom none of those are motivating factors.

somesortofthing 2mo ago

I think pieces like this miss the forest for the trees. Software is the bottleneck for a vast array of economic activities. Attention from intelligent people is most of the rest. Both are mostly-commoditized already and are just waiting around for technological diffusion and the closing of the RSI loop. Unless you're doing so as a hobby with no expectation of returns, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth learning anymore.

PessimalDecimal 2mo ago
Lots of unsubstantiated claims here
abc_lisper 2mo ago
I don't know how one would build anything without knowing. If it was true, I would be building a competitor to Anthropic right now.
- Madmallard 2mo ago
  I mean only people with billions of dollars can make competitors to anthropic because of necessary compute costs that's the barrier to entry
  - davidpapermill 2mo ago
    Only people with billions of dollars can train foundation models, yes. But a competitor to Anthropic at the product level? With open source models, very little barrier.
- somesortofthing 2mo ago
  You build without knowing by delegating to a system that extrapolates what it knows about you and what you want, and is able to execute on that to deliver faster, better, and more completely than you ever could. You'll live as a ball of intent and values, observing in wonder as everything you desire springs up around you before you know you want it. You could choose not to live like this of course, but it would be like driving a DIY go-kart on the highway - you'll fall behind and get in others' way, and the rest of society will treat you accordingly. That's the optimistic case, anyway.

sublinear 2mo ago

I don't entirely disagree, but I absolutely hate these blog posts. They always miss the point entirely. It's been enough years of this that it seems like a deliberate muddying of waters. "Knowing how to code" has always been poorly defined and full of silly arguments. Nobody employs code monkeys. What matters more is that you understand how things work. There's zero progress on that with AI. LLMs might even be negative progress on education.

appleappleapple 2mo ago
>Nobody hires code monkeys. Respectfully disagree here. People have always hired code monkeys and arguably they will hire more of them as engineers become increasingly able to defer their judgment to LLMs. It might be true that the top level companies expect strong mental models of the code but in my experience many companies (especially startups) really just want the 0->1 ability and don’t care how you get there.

psadri 2mo ago

Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc. All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.

al_borland 2mo ago
Steve Jobs used to say that everyone should learn to program, because it teaches you how to think. https://youtu.be/BRTOlPdyPYU https://youtu.be/BRTOlPdyPYU
- steve_adams_86 2mo ago
  Lately I wonder if people should learn philosophy because it teaches you how to reason, what to reason about, and why. Just like with programming, you’re constantly forced to interrogate your impressions and reconsider what you took for granted. It’s an extremely useful exercise. Nothing will show you how wrong you constantly are like testing the logic of a program you wrote. It’s a bit like learning to program, but without a compiler as the referee or the domain constraints. Maybe that’s where we should put more energy if learning to think is the goal, though I don’t know what could replace the purely logical and verifiable qualities of programming. That isn’t so readily available with philosophy, for better or worse. We do need people to practice thinking and self-interrogation far more than we do today.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    > We do need people to practice thinking and self-interrogation far more than we do today. I think a lot of people are turning to AI for this, which can be dangerous if they haven’t already developed these critical thinking skills.
deleted 2mo ago
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snek_case 2mo ago

wasting_time 2mo ago

The era of LLMs is similar to when Magic was discovered in the 1400s. The layperson may be able to get ahold of a spellbook, but without Understanding it comes with high risk of turning your niece into a frog. Whereas Wizards can cast increasingly powerful spells that build on each other, and make Art.

fragmede 2mo ago
Knowing someone's true name in the wizarding world meant to hold power over them. Though if you know someone's account name on Reddit or only fans or Snapchat, it's kind of the same thing.
NuclearPM 2mo ago
I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
- codazoda 2mo ago
  I think he’s wasting time.
  - NonHyloMorph 2mo ago
    Well good for him
- layman51 2mo ago
  I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too. Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselves crazy by chatting with an LLM, but with divination, I heard it can cause distress to ask the same questions about yourself many too frequently and also they ask about outcomes instead of methods.
  - 2mo ago

hahooh 2mo ago

it sounds like backing up any learning... not just coding

MrLeap 2mo ago

To create things via AI without being able to comprehend the output is to trust completely in the agent(s). Operating that way is more optimistic than experience has taught me to be.

p1necone 2mo ago

Anecdotally, the people who I know who were not particularly good developers pre-llms still manage to produce bad code even using flagship models now. I think having solid knowledge/understanding of good architecture and general practices is still crucial, and it's easy to forget that the foundational knowledge and instinct you take for granted now actually took a lot of time and effort to learn when you were less experienced.

deleted 2mo ago
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llama052 2mo ago
100% this. I observe this all the time. LLMs can be a force multiplier but those who don’t ask the right questions or understand the nuance still produce bad code, it’s just amplified. I don’t think any of the current models can avoid that, especially when it’s based on data it’s been fed, which is historically human generated.
- tetha 2mo ago
  And interestingly, a few good people at work are learning faster with the LLMs at hand. To a degree, it looks like LLMs help them overcome the blank page anxiety and help them with the grunt work of, well, actually writing code, which actually contains a lot of technical nuances to keep track of. But once that's down, I'm having very good discussions with them on what makes good, maintainable and sustainable code bases. It's almost like the old writing advice my Mark Twain: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” It's easier to dislike a part of something existing and fix that, than trying to create the perfect thing at once.

adamddev1 2mo ago

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't AI agents replacing the coding mostly being done on the outer layers of development? I mean, end user applications, apps, dashboards, business applications? On this "outer crust" people can maybe tolerate things with 99% accuracy, or bloated code. A vibe coded app can be argued to be "good enough." (Even then, look at the disaster that Microsoft apps have become post AI adoption.) But people are still staying away from LLMs on the critical compilers, frameworks, tools and libraries that people need to really rely on. No one wants to build on code that is 99% accurate or bloated. No one wants to use an AI coded web browser. To really build good building materials, you need to code it and know what you're doing. Where is anybody even getting close to phasing out coding in those critical areas?

em-bee 2mo ago
doesn't the recent bun controversy tell a different story?
- adamddev1 2mo ago
  exactly, it seems like people run away when a tool becomes heavily AI developed.
bad_haircut72 2mo ago
This type of comment retroactively assigns human written code a quality which it has never had. "No one wants to build on code that is 99% accurate or bloated" - my friend have you ever used Windows??
- forgetfreeman 2mo ago
  While there are certainly more examples than either of us can count of shitty half-baked codebases claiming quality code has never existed is pretty wild. With humans it's at least something to be aspired to and occasionally even accomplished.
- adamddev1 2mo ago
  Of course Windows is garbage. But this is the sort of defeatist argument that always shows up among both AI optimists and places where corruption is rampant. Corruption and incorrectness is established as an inescapable baseline, and then greater systematic corruption (like LLMs producing constantly sub-par code) is justified.

Rover222 2mo ago

"Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music" Um no, you've gone too far.

em-bee 2mo ago
i recommend you look at the demo scene for a counter argument.
dd8601fn 2mo ago
I'm no Mozart, but I find it really fucking weird when we act like woodworking is artful and creating software isn't.
- Ampersander 2mo ago
  Programmers do woodworking in their free time and programming at the assembly line in the crud factory.
- Rover222 2mo ago
  Sounds like you have no artistic sensibility
jplusequalt 2mo ago
Roller Coaster Tycoon was programmed in fucking assembly. That's a work of artistry right there.
- Rover222 2mo ago
  Calling it as rich as the best works of literature is peak programmer angst.
  - jplusequalt 2mo ago
    Trying to compare apples to oranges is peak idiocy.

Dumblydorr 2mo ago

Thin post with more ads for their company than arguments. Many pursuits are worthwhile, yet almost no one does most pursuits. Coding is going to become a niche activity like portrait painting or making toys. It’s fun but there’s far cheaper easier ways to get a superior product.

MeetingsBrowser 2mo ago
Driving schools will shut down within the year because self driving cars will be prevalent
stevekrouse 2mo ago
Ah damn, sorry about that. I removed my footer "ads" in response to this feedback. Appreciate it.

librasteve 2mo ago

<<And finally, programming is simply fun. It's a joy. My calling in life is to spread the joy of programming,>> must be a Raku coder -Ofun

hollowturtle 2mo ago

The very fact we need to discuss that it's a sign that we lost and slop has won. Learning to code it's a journey that never ends, after almost 15+ years I feel like I still learn and that my code sucks, if I delegate everything to the slot machine I feel like I'm being retro actively turned into a junior, thanks but no thanks. I'll still use LLMs and Agents the best I can but coding is mine

platevoltage 2mo ago
I have this mindset too. I use LLMs too, but strictly as a helper. nothing goes in my code that I don't understand, or that doesn't follow the style of the rest of the project. It's a great research tool, although I can already feel my documentation reading skills diminishing slightly.

seanclayton 2mo ago

Who in the world has time to learn how to code? Who has that much copious free time when they're working two jobs?

Jtsummers 2mo ago
> Who has that much copious free time when they're working two jobs? Only two jobs? You'll need a better reason than that.

ekidd 2mo ago

As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Senior people who already know how to code are doing OKish for now, from the data I've seen, but the job is increasingly babysitting models like they were junior contributors.

Animats 2mo ago
> As a professional programmer entering the final third of an enjoyable career, I would now place "learning to code" in the same category as "making a living as a poet." As in, it's truly enjoyable art and some people appreciate it, but you'd better plan for a day job. Not wrong. Probably. I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint. She never obtained an academic appointment. She never found a job that needed those skills. She died alone a few years ago. That may be the fate of many programmers.
- tkocmathla 2mo ago
  > I'm reminded of an old friend from long ago. She was an early music major at Harvard, and graduated with a MFA. She was very good. She read and wrote Latin and Greek, could compose and play music using medieval notations, and published a book on early needlepoint. This sounds to me like a life well lived!
- alightsoul 2mo ago
  If I have learned something is that people in this field of work highly underestimate their skills. I still remember when people said gpt 3.5 was the end of programming and that I shouldn't pursue it. I am so glad I took the risk anyway. Although things are much brighter outside the us and Europe https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report exactly the same countries where ai is mostly seen as unacceptable.

ohadkr 2mo ago

[flagged]

bigstrat2003 2mo ago

Even if you want to use an LLM (which you probably shouldn't, but it's your life), you best know how to program if you want to make anything good. They suck at programming, and need a human to guide them.

KashifNY 2mo ago

With everyday bringing new developments in the world, a lot of skills that used to be in demand are being replaced with new age tools. This has been the case in many industries and its evolving. The last 6 years have reshaped the world as we know it very aggressively and the best we can do is flow and adapt to the new times

assimpleaspossi 2mo ago

Coding is easy. It's the programming that's hard. I'm glad I'm a programmer and not just a coder. Just like Hemingway was a writer and not just a stenographer or typist.

VariousPrograms 2mo ago

It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail. The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".

brewtide 2mo ago
Where do these new top notch programmers come from and what proof of top notchness will be required for job proof? (Honest questions)
- confidantlake 2mo ago
  MIT. A degree from MIT. Kind of joking but not really.
goda90 2mo ago
Here's an alternative farming analogy: knowing how to program(and adjacent skills) is like understanding plant biology, climate, food demand, supply chains etc. Code generators are like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Powerful stuff. Lots of production. Solved some big problems. But we're seeing new problems like soil depletion, runoff, decreased nutrition and knock-on effects like obesity. To solve those problems will take lots of people with the right skills, not people ignorantly using the fertilizers and pesticides according to the profit driven manufacturers instructions.

jknoepfler 2mo ago

Note that every single person telling you to not learn to code currently knows how to code, often at an expert level, and is therefore capable of reasoning about code. I learned to build such useless things as operating systems, databases and neural nets from scratch. That knowledge is foundational to my ability today to lead technical teams effectively, even in the era of copilot. I would absolutely not hire an engineer who could not code. Don't get me wrong, I don't need code monkeys any more than I need assembly experts. I need engineers who have experience building, tuning and maintaining complex software. Someone who can't code can't crack open what they're working on and reason about it in a meaningful way. That's a huge liability. Also like... they just haven't ever done that work before. I don't even know if they're going to be capable of it. I did some consulting a few years ago to convert startup codebases from Ruby on Rails to something that "would scale". Some of the projects I opened up were beyond comical. Millions and millions of dollars of investor capital burned torturing cut-rate junior engineers to get them to make a product-shaped solutions that could not be maintained, could not be scaled, could not be modified without everything breaking... entire teams of cheerful idiots who were replaceable with a single capable senior engineer who knew what they were actually doing. It was just tragic. Literal futures burned up as friction with reality, because neither the founder nor their engineers could write actual code to build clean, scalable systems without tripping over their own feet. You're signing future engineers up to be those utterly lackluster juniors for the rest of their lives. Stay in school kids. Learn to code.

glouwbug 2mo ago

I mean, iteration and interaction builds your understanding which verifies and validates what you built. Relying on agents without formal validation is like saying a tree fell in the forest

kittikitti 2mo ago

Perhaps coding will be optional rather than a requirement for the most in-demand tech jobs. But for roles including AI Engineer, someone who knows how to code will have a premium over an AI Engineer that only vibes. While the peak of "learning to code" is surely in the past, there is resentment (at least in my personal experience) that's fueling the "anti-learning to code". Personally, it was very frustrating when learning how to program and I gave up many times before finally getting it. In general, when people cannot obtain competence in a certain area, they tend to disregard the importance of it to shield their ego. What's going on now in corporate are nasty politics because people who decided not to learn to code seek that the skill is disregarded entirely and even mocked.

taybin 2mo ago

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

prettyblocks 2mo ago
Yes, if you're just going down a list of jira tickets and implementing product features, but for many folks it's also an art medium.
- alightsoul 2mo ago
  It's like the purpose of portraits before photographs were invented. Maybe ai is like the camera for the photograph, and the canvas for portraits is writing code.
tempest_ 2mo ago
I make this comparison a lot and a lot of devs don't like it. I am sure I could make a decent industrial PLC tech, same shit, different tools.
yowlingcat 2mo ago
I kinda like the music comparison because it's so rich with sociological analogues. You have the gear snobs who can't stop buying more premium gear but never sit down and write anything. The kids who pick up a copy of Garageband and put together hits with their natural talent, sense of taste and and interesting story to tell. Soundtrack and videogame composers who have hybrid instincts of session musicians and architects. Avant garde musicians who you're never fully sure of whether they're playing a joke you're in on (or on you) and that's kinda the point. Music critics who have never played or written music a day in their life and yet end up becoming arbiters (or more accurately, delegates) of taste. Fandom stans and ringleaders who absorb it as an identity and run extraordinarily well organized cults with an iron fist. You can probably find correlates here with coding and AI any which way you look. Coding is so rich that you can use it to do artistic, creative pursuits because it really is an interactive and world building medium if you want it to be. And it can also be a practical, reliable machine that helps you get useful business objectives done. And anywhere in between! Perhaps the author is indexing on the former because there's an intrinsic value to that, and intrinsic values seem to be quite drowned out by the noise of extrinsic values in this media supercycle. But I don't think it'll be that way forever. Whenever things get too noisy, people have a way of seeking peace and quiet.

tibbar 2mo ago

I was quite worried about having to code when I interviewed recently. A two- or three- year layoff is a lot. Turns out that it didn't really make much difference! After a few weeks of warm-up exercises, coding was as natural as ever and turned out to be the easier part of technical assessments. I guess a couple decades of muscle memory is hard to lose. Now then, back to using Fable. It is doing work that previously took me months in an evening.

h4kunamata 2mo ago

A few years from now after the AI hype has cooled down (it has already started), where will be two types of people: 1. The ones who use AI for everything and therefore, are unable to think on their own, unable to make decisions on their own, and everything in between. Looking for a job will be fun because their skills now depend on AI dependency rather than skill. 2. The ones who use AI as tool and therefore, are still able to do things on their own, make decisions on their own. Looking for a job will be just another Tuesday in the office, and were are already seeing companies hiring them back to replace AI.

politician 2mo ago

Well this is ridiculous. Literature or music?! No, learning to code is still worthwhile because the AI cannot do useful abstraction well at all. If you don't know how to code, then you'll fail to build useful tools and useful reusable components that can (a) further accelerate your development speed, and (b) reduce token spend.

grandimam 2mo ago

I have always found similarities between programming and filmmaking. Programmer being the director and the LLM being the entire apparatus upon which the film/software is built. This became evident to me while doing spec-driven development for a few of my projects where I specify the constraints upon which the software should be build, but have limited control over the performance similar to how a director has limited control over an actor's performance.

pophenat 2mo ago

If you can’t code, you’ll be like a mathematician or statistician who can’t do basic math because they have tools that can do it for them. We don’t tell kids they don’t need to know how to do basic math operations because they have Excel and calculators.

joka88xj 2mo ago

[flagged]

infinitebit 2mo ago

Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra? Probably not, because they *don’t exist because learning basic math is necessary to learn higher level math*. Whether or not we have calculators to do basic math is irrelevant if you want to become a mathematician. I’d argue that “whether or not the average dev will be writing any code by hand in 5 years” is irrelevant to whether or not one should learn to code *if they want to master designing and building complex software* using whatever method they will be using.

HNisCIS 2mo ago
I take the opposite view but to the same conclusion. I've heard the joke "the more advanced you get the worse you get at math" from a lot of mathematicians. I'd bet most mathematicians can't do a long division problem without having to think pretty hard about it, because they've long since moved past that skill. All that said, people still learn and do manual math at all levels in order to advance the field even though calculators and python notebooks exist. I think people get too wrapped up in LLMs being the entirety of the future when the LLMs themselves are entirely a product of the past. An LLM is less a thinking machine than a lossy JPEG for language and to an extent, knowledge represented in language. As such, if you want to expand the field and move into the future you aren't going to rely solely on an algorithm that reverts to the mean.
- david_rugaex 2mo ago
  I'm in the same boat! It's a reasonable stance but the specific examples aren't air tight. I'm a Mathematician and I can't do long division, I could probably work it out? Like you say, long division was part of a journey that made me very mathematically capable, even if it's no longer an active contributor. My capacity for pencil and paper calculus is undoubtably many many fold worse than my peak around undergraduate studies!
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  I think a major difference between math and software development is that software development tends to get easier after one gets through the educational barrier to entry, whereas math (and many other topics) become more complex/puzzly. Something that could highly accurately revert to the mean would be insanely useful when the overwhelming majority of what you're doing is mundane and has been done a million times before - the analog of something like basic arithmetic or calculus. Take for instance most CRUD apps. They're all doing basically the same stuff just with variations on interface/schema. And that's a huge chunk of all professional software development. We're already at the point where you can describe said schema/interface and get a pretty good implementation of it, and things will likely continue to only get better. I think the job-apocalypse is unlikely, but I also think it's unlikely that 'manual coding' will be anywhere near as significant a part of the economy in the future as it is today.

gyulai 2mo ago

I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. The practical question for someone planning out their career from todays' point of view, is that it's uncertain when that time will come, and these markets can and will stay irrational for longer than any single individual trying to resist them will be able to stay solvent.

piyush24rai 2mo ago
[flagged]
palmotea 2mo ago
> ...and [1] codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and [2] LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. [3] At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. You are a very optimistic person. IMHO, claims #1 & #2 will happen, but #3 won't. People, especially business leaders, will just adjust their expectations downwards (or be forced to do so). Just think of how often some "new and improved version" drops some important feature you used without providing a good replacement? We'll get more of that. If the codebase is unmaintainable, they'll just regenerate a new pile of garbage that will change stuff randomly and call it an improvement.
- pydry 2mo ago
  We've been on this merry go round before with the "outsourcing to the cheapest programmers in india" boom. That slopfest ended with a new executive dogma of "hire only the best programmers" as so many of those projects were humiliating disasters which had to be junked. I do not think that was coincidental. Executive fashions can remain remarkably consistent and irrational for years as they try to make reality conform to their expectations before doing a complete 180.

HNisCIS 2mo ago

Here's a much simpler reason: the output of an LLM, mathematically, is average. The code it writes is, effectively, the geometric mean of github. The ideas it comes up with are the geometric mean of wikipedia and reddit. Go ask it how to do something truly "out there" and watch it give you the most milquetoast reply you've ever seen. I asked Fable 5 to create a profitable business and the best it could come up with was: >Sell an expensive, recurring B2B service into your network, fulfill it with technical leverage, then productize it into software once you've done the same work five times. Yeah, good fucking work, nobody's ever thought of that. It's obvious why it picked that though, every 3rd post on this forum and half of the rest of the internet is singing the praises of be-your-own-boss SaaS passive income and it turns out that if you convolve all of that into a black box this is what you're gonna get.

elestor 2mo ago

Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think - Steve Jobs

4gotunameagain 2mo ago
It teaches you a very specific way of thinking, albeit a useful one.
xikxp1 2mo ago
Everybody should learn to program a computer, so we could hire the best to build our products. That's what he wanted to say. If he really meant what he said, he'd took some effort to learn himself

robpus 2mo ago

[flagged]

Alien1Being 2mo ago

Learning Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is also worthwhile. Like learning a programming language, these activities stretch your mind in different ways. And expose you to a different kind of beauty and a very different world.

kypro 2mo ago
> Learning Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is also worthwhile. In what sense? From this perspective everything is worthwhile. If "worthwhile" is relative to learning other skills then Classical Latin and Ancient Greek is near the bottom of that pile, and you probably know what which is why you cited them. So then the question is where coding sits on that hierarchy, and if someone should learn to code vs acquiring other skills. Personally I'd not advise anyone to learn to code today. It's not just that I'm not convinced of the utility of the skill going forward, but I also think it's very hard to actually learn to code competently for someone starting out today. I had the luxury of spending decades coding without LLMs professionally. No one learning today is realistically going to have the opportunity to compete with old school coders with decades of experience writing code by hand, even if we assume the skill will be worth anything.
- tanker_war 2mo ago
  Surely you're capable of understanding that the term "worthwhile" has multiple meanings.
  - kypro 2mo ago
    Yes, I'm not sure it was clear, but that was largely my point – to say it's "worthwhile" as a flat statement probably doesn't capture the nuance. It's obviously going to be worthwhile in some sense as almost all skills are worthwhile to some degree. But normally when we're talking about whether something is worthwhile to learn we're weighing up other competing things we could be learning instead. In that sense I think it's far more debatable about whether coding is worthwhile to learn.
- robocat 2mo ago

inigyou 2mo ago

Nothing is worthwhile if we all die in the end...

mishonyAI 2mo ago

[dead]

bogrollben 2mo ago

The arguments put forward are very weak, in my opinion. It made me depressed, not hopeful, as in: if this is all we have left, things are becoming desperate indeed. To elaborate, if coding is like art, it's the worst art there is. It's far closer to something like legos and the satisfaction you get from completing a noteworthy build. Maybe that's the writer's point - yes it's still worthwhile, in a purely hobbyist sort of way. I find the "coding helps math" argument to be similarly weak. Yes, it certainly helps with algebra, but overall I would argue the coding flavor of math largely helps more coding type of math. It's a strange type of math with loops and rules and conditionals that wouldn't be mainstream if software wasn't so mainstream to begin with. When you pull back the covers, the argument sounds more circular than something with true meat on the bones.

elzbardico 2mo ago

Sometimes I think that I must be a complete low IQ imbecile, because for me, even using Fable, code is still a pretty much hands-on affair. Not in the sense of actually writing lines of code (I still like to create things like structs, interfaces, traits, as a form of prompting, natural language for that kind of stuff is actually more verbose and way less precise). But I hate waste, I hate dead code, I hate byzantine constructions and reinventing the wheel, and thus, most of the time, I keep a close eye on reasoning traces, frequently interrupt and steer the agent, and prefer to review the diffs as they are done in very small increments. And everytime I am lazy, and try to just vibe code stuff, inevitably the old "all abstractions are leaky" adage rear its ugly head and I see myself reviewing a fucking giant delta and asking the agent: "but, why? when you could just..." It is not possible that all those famous people are wrong and I am right. If my results when giving full autonomy to an agent are usually sub-optimal under my point of view, well, what if the problem is with MY point of view? I am starting to get depressed thinking that maybe I have some personality flaw that will prevent me from truly reaping the fruits of this new age. At one side I think it is absurdly fantastic that I have this pair programmer so productive and with fantastic recall, but on the other side, I can't really relinquish control, I feel like it can't build a coherent architecture, I am still attached to the idea that engineering principles like low coupling, information hiding, high cohesion, low cyclomatic complexity, modularity, sound typing are important, and maybe I am just a fucking old curmudgeon that can't get up with the times.

wes-k 2mo ago
There’s a huge difference between does it work vs is it elegant. As a software engineer I have been strict on making sure my code is elegant. Vibe coding has switched me to product (and project) manager. Why would I care about what the code looks like? Does it work!? Does it do what I want? Does the app have the right UI and UX? These are my concerns now. I rarely look at the output code.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

agentultra 2mo ago

Coding does not inherently have the “precision” of mathematics. If you’ve ever tried to formally verify even a basic algorithm you’ll know how “loose” programs are with their specifications. If you end up down this route you’ll gain an appreciation for a branch of mathematics that has spent most of its history maligned by the wider community. I too finally started grokking trigonometry and calculus in high school thanks much due to programming. I don’t think it’s the best entry point for mathematics though. Us programmers tend to bias its effect on our learning and appreciation. For most people programming is tedious, cryptic, and frustrating. It doesn’t aid understanding mathematics if you can’t even use it. Maths is beautiful on its own. And so is programming. I think it’s still worthwhile because for all that these systems can do it still takes an experienced human to drive them. Any positive results are due to a human understanding the training data, the system, and importantly the output. You can’t one-shot a production grade C compiler or OS with these tools and never will be able to without over fitting the model. You need to know what a production grade C compiler requires in order to generate one using tools like this. So keep learning. Mainly because it suits you, benefits you, and you like doing it.

ozgrakkurt 2mo ago

This “don’t need to learn code” vibe will bring a big quality and good pay wave programming. It was getting more obnoxious because of more and more mba guys getting into programming because there is money in it. Hopefully this will act as an effective filter against money people so they can keep going into law or w/e else they believe there is money

ilpapayon 2mo ago

It has always been.

jasmar 2mo ago

Correction: Learning to software engineer is still worthwhile

unjuno 2mo ago

[flagged]

Ferret7446 2mo ago

What is "learn to code"? Is it learning the syntax of a programming language? Is it learning CS fundamentals? Is it learning OS fundamentals? Is it learning common tools and libraries? Is it learning programming paradigms? Is it learning how to read and debug code? Is it learning Java boilerplate? Is it learning an esoteric sequence of keystrokes to perform an edit in vim? That last one I think has definitely been superceded by LLMs, and I say this as an ed user.