Discussion summary
Discussions highlight the ongoing value of learning to code, with some emphasizing its importance for economic and creative pursuits. Opinions vary on the impact of AI and the necessity of coding skills for future development.
What the discussion says
- Coding remains essential for economic activities and innovation.
- Some believe AI advancements make coding skills more valuable.
- Others argue that coding skills may become obsolete or less relevant.
“Learning to code will never not make sense.”
“Code is a beautiful form of creative expression.”
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- Hacker News
- 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.
by psadri - Does anyone here know any mathematicians who can’t do long division or basic algebra?
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.
by infinitebit - 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?
by adamddev1 - > 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.
by OhSoHumble - 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.
by p1necone - 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.
by ekidd - I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. The practical question for someone planning out their career from todays' point of view, is that it's uncertain when that time will come, and these markets can and will stay irrational for longer than any single individual trying to resist them will be able to stay solvent.by gyulai
- > 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.
by taybin