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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.

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)

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.

Now then, back to using Fable. It is doing work that previously took me months in an evening.

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.

- Steve Jobs

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.

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".

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.

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.

must be a Raku coder -Ofun

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.

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 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

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.

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.

Panasonic still makes laptops, enterprise use only, very expensive.

How is that relevant? Well, directly.

Learning to code is a must. You need to know what is possible or easy to know how much you can ask.

What will be less important is to keep your sword sharp.

I notice that if code less for some time I do more one-off errors, copy/paste mistakes etc. With llm keeping the coding skill warm is less important but I cannot imagine doing my work - even with Fable if I didn't know how to do it without him

Your scenario would only unfold if frontier labs decided not to compete on capabilities. It sounds unlikely.

Meanwhile more people will build and use software than ever before, and all of these "everything is going to hell" diatribes will be laughably overblown.

The concern for code quality has become increasingly unfounded. I have noticed over the last year or so that you can still tell when a codebase is 100% AI generated, but not because it is poorly written or disorganized, but that it is now dramatically better than any human would have written.

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.

Learning to code is not merely learning a syntax and some tooling. It’s best described in the SICP and HTDP books, as a mindset of formalizing a process enough that a dumb machine could do it. Then by building abstractions towers, we have better symbols and semantics to notate the formal aspect.

It seems that a lot of management no longer wants to provide workflows tooling to their users. Instead they want to create a wish box where those workflows would materialize somehow.

Contra: I'm reading digital circuits and introductory FPGA programming books this summer - fullstack development for the robotics dominated future here I come ;) Granted some EE classes in your old major will help. But modern digital circuits and embedded hardware space also have a lot of similarity to your muscle memory as a software developer.

Where is the data? There is no data but a lot of vibes, from the data I have seen

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...

If we end up with those being the kind of jobs you have to get to make a living as a programmer we could end up with programming a lot like sports.

You can enjoy playing basketball, say, as an amateur, and you can play more seriously in high school and college, but if you want to make a living playing basketball you need to be good enough to make the NBA.

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

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.

These things were still indispensable on my path to being a mathematician though, they just ceased to be relevant as abstraction increased.

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.

Everyone in this thread is failing to sell the pen lol