Ask HN: Should we still learn coding?

9 points by NarcisMirandes 7 hours ago | 17 comments

Paul Graham talked about this in a recent essay:

"Should students still study computer science if AIs will write most code? ... even if you have AIs writing all your code for you, you're still in the position of an engineering manager, and good engineering managers should be able to do the work of those working for them."

Paul Graham. August 2026 https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html

I think that argument makes a lot of sense and coincides with my experience. I code all my projects, and I only use AI as a teacher, or bug finder. Again and again I see AI giving me a complicated, confusing code for something that could be much simpler, cleaner and organized. If I let AI write code I do not completely understand, sooner than later it all becomes a great mess that not even that AI can understand.

Still there are a lot of people who say that learning to code is not necessary. What do you think - Should we learn to code? - If you already know how to code, do you keep learning? - What are your experiences?

softwarewright 5 hours ago |

My experience working with programmers for decades (as an individual contributor, team lead, architect, release engineer, engineering manager) is that great programmers are rare and most programmers are good enough and a few flunk out. Since AI is trained on "the internet" it sees and learns a lot of bad habits, poor coding examples, shortcuts, oversimplified solutions, and therefore, by default, produces code that can be improved. To use AI coding agents effectively, you must be able to spot bad code, suggest better approaches, add guardrails, tests, checks, guidance, etc. to keep the agents on track and improve their output. If you do not deeply understand data structures, algorithms, idioms, best practices, footguns, design patterns, etc., you cannot help the agents provide better code.

KinetiNode 5 hours ago |

100% , AI should never be placed in a position where it makes all the decisions itself. Even if it can make the descisions doesn't mean you should let it. A manager is required ,that was said correctly by paul graham. Also whether you need to learn CS depends on your goal , if you're someone who have to work in corporate or in a company then learning CS is still required. But if your only goal is to make something using your own creative ideas then not learning CS is valid. But it also depends on what kind of person you are. For me example i only started using AI to speed up my working once I understood everything. Some people hate completely depending on something or someone which leads them to learning the skill so they can stop depending.

CM30 6 hours ago |

Yes, I think people should still learn to code. Why? Well, a few reasons really:

First, if the AI is unavailable, you at least have a backup plan. You can make changes to your website or web app even if Claude or Codex or whatever else is available. That's useful if you're using third party services.

Secondly, it lets you delve into the code and understand where things have gone wrong if the agent gets stuck in a loop or keeps making poor decisions. If you let the AI handle everything, then you're up a creek without a paddle if said AI gets stuck and can't make any progress.

Finally, it's sometimes quicker and more efficient to make a change without using AI, especially if it's a small scale one. Lots of times I've wanted to add a new form field or tweak some random CSS rule, and being able to do that myself made things a lot quicker.

NarcisMirandes 6 hours ago | |

You say it better than be. This is my experience also. What surprises me is that I see so many important "coders" saying things like "I have stop coding, AI is doing it all" They will lose control of the code and forget how to do it well.

agcat 5 hours ago |

Def, i think this is the most important time to learn coding because now we interact with computers more than ever. And a good programmer who is able to think in code, write good programs rather than just instructions will do much better.

I also wrote about my journey with (re)learning coding - https://aishwaryagoel.com/thinking-in-code/

jryan49 5 hours ago |

We all learn how to implement quicksort, but no one ever does it in practice. But if you don't know how to implement it, you don't really know how it works. So as long as you need to "know how it works", yes?

softwaredoug 6 hours ago |

Absolutely. I write a lot of code in 2026. You've got to be able to reason about multiple abstractions, and writing is thinking. In many situations, that means getting down to the code.

NarcisMirandes 5 hours ago | |

Paul Graham use to say something like: You can't think well without writing well. If I interpret it well, he views writing not as a way to record thoughts, but as the actual tool used to discover and refine them.

If I understand he says this related to regular text but we could extend to writing code too.

lolakutty 4 hours ago |

Yes, it is not required if you don't love it. It never was..

Someone1234 6 hours ago |

I'm going to age myself real-bad here, but I remember back when RAD ("Rapid Application Development") was the hotness of the 90s. Microsoft Access, Visual Basic (6), and even web-development itself (e.g. PHP/Wordpress).

People today likely cannot relate, but a big concern back then was identical: If the non-tech users can write their own code/and or code is easier to write, why even learn to be a programmer? What's the point?

It seems absurd now but legitimately it was exactly the same stuff. Like then, programmers will fall into two camps, those that keep up and those that fall behind. The thing with LLMs (and agentic) is that it doesn't change WHAT we do but rather HOW we do it.

So will programmers exist in the early 2000s after RAD? Well turns out, yes, and in expanded numbers. Businesses just expected more from technology, and the personnel gap never really closed. With LLMs the same will likely happen - same number of people, higher expectation.

The limit on how many programmers they'd hire was never "wants." They always wanted more than they could get. The limit was budgets/money. Now more "wants" can be fulfilled (just like post-RAD/web), but the budgets are more or less similar.

PS - Although it should be noted that the economy is not in a good place currently, and we're seeing an unusual employment environment. A lot of which "AI" is blamed on, least of all because companies can save face that way.

NarcisMirandes 6 hours ago | |

So do you think that "no-code" is just a trend, and we will all go back to code, just in a different way?

Someone1234 4 hours ago | | |

I cannot tell if this is a reference to RAD in the 90s or LLMs today, and I think that kind of shows my point.

krapp 6 hours ago |

Yes, you should learn coding if you want to. You should learn anything you want to learn.

I refuse to give my intellect over to the machine just to blindly consume its homogeneous excretions. I will keep doing what I've always done regardless of how well an AI could do it. I don't need to justify doing so, and neither do you, nor does anyone. It's OK to be a human.

NarcisMirandes 5 hours ago | |

I love that. "It's OK to be a human"... "we don't need to justify"

krapp 5 hours ago | | |

It's weird that "should we still learn" is even a question begin asked on this forum of ostensibly intellectually curious people.

I guess a lot of folks really did just get into programming for the money and hated every minute of it.

d--b 6 hours ago |

It depends.

If your goal is making small apps, websites, things that aren't too critical performance-wise, I don't think you should learn to code.

But code isn't disappearing. Calculation-heavy processes, large apps, video games, basically things that need a deep understanding of tradeoffs, still require a lot of human inputs.

Will it be always that way, I don't know. But I'd like to think AI won't totally kill the code, in the same way compilers didn't kill assembly dev.

NarcisMirandes 6 hours ago | |

Your distinction makes sense.

But still, I am building relatively small apps and I do nor see any AI making clean, organized, long-term code. I do not see any path that they could do it in a near future.