Learning to code is still worthwhile(stevekrouse.com) |
Learning to code is still worthwhile(stevekrouse.com) |
Um no, you've gone too far.
"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.
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.
That's the optimistic case, anyway.
that's the barrier to entry
But a competitor to Anthropic at the product level? With open source models, very little barrier.
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.
It will be fewer and fewer people with, probably, deeper and deeper knowledge (and job security and compensation to boot).
Poet is a bad comparison. But something like low-level semiconductor physics or assembly is closer to the mark.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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)
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.
All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.
The issue is probably that many managers can't really tell the difference between a good programmer and a vibe-coder. The vibe coder ships a lot of PRs. Maybe they themselves ship some vibe-coded PRs. They hate the idea that programmers might know better than them.
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.
Real Estate, it always boils down to real estate.
Lev Grossman wrote an entire book that hinged on this idea of melding magic with technology.
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.
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.
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.
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"
must be a Raku coder -Ofun
Only two jobs? You'll need a better reason than that.
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.
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.
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.
To me the issue is more that conceptualizing requires a certain state of mind. Before llms it was 10% hard thinking 90% implementing. Implementation was actually sort of a reward, it felt so good just being in the zone and fleshing out ideas.
Post llms I find myself walking up and down quite a lot, only doing the thinking. Now it's more like 40% thinking 60% reviewing plans/code. I haven't experienced flow state since. The thinking is fun but exhausting, the reviewing is just kind of annoying, especially as llms get into these weird failure modes. Before I could look at a bad piece of code and instantly tell what the author was thinking and why the thing doesn't work. Now I need to be a lot more careful because there is little code smell, but a lot of badly chosen abstractions.
Just exhausting...
I think conceptualizing and refining the abstraction is the essence of the beauty of the craft and progress.
Talk about driving people off a cliff
2026: "the median developer is a craftsman whose work is being replaced by AI slop"
Sorry what people would tolerate? Go look around and ask people, friends and family. They all hate slow bloated software, it costs us dunno how much in time and productivity. With the advent of LLMs it only got worse not better
This is such a good way to put it.
I could learn asm maybe in a college course. But no other incentive.
No one wanted to read asm. Now no one wants to read thru code.
That's funny. I've told a mathy friend that I've sometimes wondered if I could have grown up without the whole, "... except I suck at math", and I think that's why.
I don't struggle with the problem solving. I've watched people reinvent chunks of "difficult" math in code without realizing or caring that they've done it.
I've started to think that math might actually be awful on purpose.
the most useful thing i learned about computers is to create logic gates by hand. nothing gave me a deeper insight into how a computer works than that. programming is the next step up. you can skip all the layers in between because you can extrapolate them. no need to learn assembler, but it may be worth reading about it, just to get an idea.
understanding the layers from logic gates, to assembly, to programming, to games and now AI is kind of like reading about the OSI model to understand networking. it's one layer of abstraction on top of another.
learning programming is worthwhile because it is the highest layer of abstraction that is shared by everything above it. despite there being hundreds of programming languages, the concepts are all the same. once you understand programming through learning one language you can apply that understanding to almost all other languages. on the other hand there are tens of thousands of games in hundreds of types. not to mention all the other applications. the tree of variation explodes at that level.
I just sort of assume people don't want to be stupid and ignorant, but maybe I'm wrong