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- Hacker News
- 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.
by d--b - 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.by KinetiNode
- I recently tried vibe coding a couple apps in an environment I’m completely unfamiliar with, Xcode and Swift. Pre-AI, any time I tried, I quickly hit the learning curve and quit, as it seemed to make more sense to invest that kind of effort into skills that are useful at my day job.
The AI allowed me to sail right past the learning curve, building an app I’ve wanted for years in just a few hours. I haven’t really looked at the code at all. With that said, I feel I’ve already started to hit the wall. The app works, it’s fine… but it’s got weird behaviors the AI doesn’t seem to be able to fix. The animation at the end of the drag and drop is wrong and confusing.. it’s telling me that’s the default animation with no options to change or disable it… I exhausted my AI quota twice on this before giving up. Drag-and-drop feels clunky in general, after quite a bit of prompting to tweak it. I still seemingly have to know how an app should behave and tell it to add all the little quality of life things everyone expects to “just work” on macOS… the AI didn’t assume and add any of it. 25 years as a user on macOS and 20 years in tech is how I see the issues and know what is missing and what to ask for.
If I want the app to actually feel great to use, and be the level of quality I’d expect from others, I can’t keep promoting my way there. It made an MVP, but I feel like that’s as far as it goes. I need to read the human interface guide, learn the frameworks, learn Swift, learn SwiftUI, probably learn some AppKit… if you rely on the AI entirely, your app will only be as good as what the AI can do. Right now, that doesn’t what it can do is an MVP that makes for an impressive tech demo or a personal utility, where you’re ok dealing with the limitations and rough edges.
I did write up my initial request, and tweaked from there. Maybe if I started with a markdown file, describing the full specs, every expected drag and drop action, etc… it would be better. But I keep thinking back to Dave Plumber saying his spec for TMOG was 107 pages long. If I’m writing 107 pages of spec, I might as well just code the app at that point, and learn something along the way.
by al_borland - 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.
- 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.
by CM30 - > Should we still learn coding?
As an intellectual exercise, sure.
I don't have a crystal ball, but in my opinion, if you are asking in the context of employment, I think it's very hard to know, and I'd probably recommend against it if you are starting from scratch. Right now, I think that having experience with coding helps me work much more effectively alongside LLMs. Given the progress in the last five years though, I can't be certain that I will be needed in another 10 years. I already recommend against majoring in computer science with the goal of becoming a software engineer. I don't think that the role will go away, but the number of people needed might be much smaller in 10 years, and I wouldn't want to be a new grad in that kind of market.
> If you already know how to code, do you keep learning?
I'm sure others feel differently, but personally, I find it quite annoying to learn new things right now. 5 years ago, if someone came out with a new tool for say, durable workflows, or a new JS framework, I knew that they poured many days of labor and love into the project. They spent many hours thinking through what they were building and the tradeoffs and edge cases. Now, there's just an avalanche of new projects out there and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Personally, I'm more focused on developing soft skills right now.
by chadash - I'd like to share my own experience, which perfectly illustrates Paul Graham's point.
I was trying to fix a bug in ART using Frida. I admitted I knew nothing about the intricate details or tricks of ART. I couldn't even understand why the original author wrote the code in a certain way. Feeling lost, I turned to GPT. But because I couldn't understand the AI's complex reasoning, I couldn't guide it. The AI stubbornly blamed a conflict between Frida and JVMTI and ran in the wrong direction for an hour with zero progress.
Eventually, I gave up on the AI and decided to debug it myself. I couldn't afford to read the whole ART codebase to understand the full context. But in the AI era, the cost of getting a quick summary is near zero. With AI helping me grasp the big picture, I pinpointed the actual bug: a compilation callback issue during ART's transition between runnable and native states.
Before, finding this bug would have required days of reading ART's code. Now, with AI helping me understand something I'm completely unfamiliar with, it took just 1 hour.
My key takeaway: AI is incredibly useful, but if you just say "I don't understand, you keep going," you'll be stuck forever. You still need to learn things.
This is exactly why we should still learn to code. AI is a powerful tool for lowering the cost of understanding, but it cannot replace the human ability to judge, guide, and intervene. You need to know enough to be the manager.
by mgaldys4 - 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.
by krapp