Learning to code is still worthwhile

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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".

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.

<<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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Learning the fundemntals but not syntax

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

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.

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.

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

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.

"Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music"

Um no, you've gone too far.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.