About a year ago I wrote something similar about software, "Now might be the best time to learn software development": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299979
Reflecting on that a year later is interesting. Agents have become REALLY good since then, and I consider the "writing code" side of my profession to be largely annihilated. Some days that's really hard to accept.
But I think Grant's conclusion about math still largely echoes what I wrote about software: don't underestimate the social aspect of these activities, and if anything AI has made the social side more important. I deliberately avoided declaring, "now is the best time to learn to write code". I suspected that skill might be going out the window. But learning systems thinking and the social skills needed to connect people's dreams to reality continues to be an important art, an art I still have the privilege to practice every day.
And if we do reach the "anything you can do I can do better" stage, then, as Grant said, that's a hard to imagine world, and one where "it can write really good code" might be the least of our problems.
I agree. I think the days of the developer who hated talking to anyone but is still very valuable are over.
I think social skills are much more important today because one person can do so much more but this person needs to talk to many others to know what to build.