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.

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.

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.

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.

Is it learning the syntax of a programming language? Is it learning CS fundamentals? Is it learning OS fundamentals? Is it learning common tools and libraries? Is it learning programming paradigms? Is it learning how to read and debug code? Is it learning Java boilerplate? Is it learning an esoteric sequence of keystrokes to perform an edit in vim?

That last one I think has definitely been superceded by LLMs, and I say this as an ed user.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

- Steve Jobs

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.

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".

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.

Like learning a programming language, these activities stretch your mind in different ways.

And expose you to a different kind of beauty and a very different world.

Hopefully this will act as an effective filter against money people so they can keep going into law or w/e else they believe there is money

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.

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

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.

1. The ones who use AI for everything and therefore, are unable to think on their own, unable to make decisions on their own, and everything in between.

Looking for a job will be fun because their skills now depend on AI dependency rather than skill.

2. The ones who use AI as tool and therefore, are still able to do things on their own, make decisions on their own.

Looking for a job will be just another Tuesday in the office, and were are already seeing companies hiring them back to replace AI.

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.

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.

But I hate waste, I hate dead code, I hate byzantine constructions and reinventing the wheel, and thus, most of the time, I keep a close eye on reasoning traces, frequently interrupt and steer the agent, and prefer to review the diffs as they are done in very small increments.

And everytime I am lazy, and try to just vibe code stuff, inevitably the old "all abstractions are leaky" adage rear its ugly head and I see myself reviewing a fucking giant delta and asking the agent: "but, why? when you could just..."

It is not possible that all those famous people are wrong and I am right. If my results when giving full autonomy to an agent are usually sub-optimal under my point of view, well, what if the problem is with MY point of view?

I am starting to get depressed thinking that maybe I have some personality flaw that will prevent me from truly reaping the fruits of this new age. At one side I think it is absurdly fantastic that I have this pair programmer so productive and with fantastic recall, but on the other side, I can't really relinquish control, I feel like it can't build a coherent architecture, I am still attached to the idea that engineering principles like low coupling, information hiding, high cohesion, low cyclomatic complexity, modularity, sound typing are important, and maybe I am just a fucking old curmudgeon that can't get up with the times.

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.

>Sell an expensive, recurring B2B service into your network, fulfill it with technical leverage, then productize it into software once you've done the same work five times.

Yeah, good fucking work, nobody's ever thought of that. It's obvious why it picked that though, every 3rd post on this forum and half of the rest of the internet is singing the praises of be-your-own-boss SaaS passive income and it turns out that if you convolve all of that into a black box this is what you're gonna get.

"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.

Um no, you've gone too far.