None. My company is hiring anyone who can use a computer and having them produce code via AI then review via AI and that is that. I was told to stop writing any code 6 months ago and haven't written a single line since. Not sure learning anything is worth it anymore, I'm shown every day at my company how they are replacing me directly and no longer have "devs" or "IT". They now call "IT", Digital Services and it can all be done by AI.
Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#22On effective engineering teams, there's always at least one person who is fluent one layer below where the rest of the team operates. That person tends to be extraordinarily useful in tricky situations. Examples: someone who can read assembly on a team writing C; someone who spends a lot of time in the browser debugger on a frontend team; or someone who is comfortable stepping deep into third-party library code with a debugger.
If any of these examples are familiar, you might chuckle that of course everyone on the team has these skills. But there's a big difference between someone who can barely parse the symbols, and someone who can actually interpret them and extract meaning.
Five to ten years from now, I have no idea whether software engineers still be coding. But I'm sure there will still be code. Do you want to be the person on your team who is fluent in it, or one of the rest who rely on that person?
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#23Well, you will be paid for your subjective decision-making, what applies where, system design, and your calculation of trade-offs. Regardless of what scaling laws say, these will remain a problem for humans to solve because real-world systems are messy.
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#24Programming is the art of applying math to solve problems. What kind of problems do you want to work on? That determines how much math to know, and what kind of programming you'll be needing to learn manually before you start offloading morsels to the bot.
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#25To the extent that you use AI at all, it should be to accelerate your own understanding in ways that are independently verifiable/falsifiable.
AI amplifies what you are.
If you take shortcuts in your education, you will remain mediocre.
If you dive deep in your understanding, building a broad and deep foundation, then you will be exponentially more powerful.
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#26YMMV but I think its going to always be important to acquire almost all the knowledge necessary to go to the metal, then allow the tactical to bits to atrophy over time. What remains is all the bones of the first principles understanding - and that will serve you well indefinitely.
An analog for you: I started in software pre-cloud, with a primary focus on web technologies, but at various times learned c/c++/asm/compilers/operating systems/algorithms. I audited many classes, but one instructive one was a course called nand2tetris (going from nand gates to hardware simulated CPU to peripherals to operating system to programming languages and compilers to application layer). Understanding the global through lines in computer science give you immense power.
Does my work as a CTO mean I use this information all the time? Absolutely not. Did I benefit from figuring out how computers work generally throughout literally my entire career? Absolutely yes.
I am actually relatively AI-pilled compared to the average Hacker News reader, but I am against outsourcing fundamental understanding to AI in all forms. Does that mean I write code by hand often anymore? Very infrequently.
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#27Back when starting my career, I always remember the repeated questions of "do you need to be able to code to work in infosec?".
The same applies here and in any other tech field, nobody ever regrets that they learned "too much".
Pick your poison and learn everything you can!
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#28[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#29YMMV but I think its going to always be important to acquire almost all the knowledge necessary to go to the metal, then allow the tactical to bits to atrophy over time. What remains is all the bones of the first principles understanding - and that will serve you well indefinitely. An analog for you: I started in software pre-cloud, with a primary focus on web technologies, but at various times learned c/c++/asm/comp…
How would you reccomend learning to code?
Re: Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?
#30"coding" is the skill that realizes other skills: it's a delivery medium.
The skill to learn is to be able to see and address the problems that will need solving in the medium term.
Even before AI, software changes a lot (desktop, enterprise, consumer web, IoT, devices, robotics...). So for the "seeing" part, it's like planning to cross the continent not knowing what transport or maps will be available: you can mainly guess they'll come out of the terrain and available materials and expertise.
For the "address" part, it's helpful to have seen similar problems, but probably more helpful to have seen a variety of problems and developed some high-level approaches, typically in academic study. Depending on your domain, that might involve math, or engineering, or biology, or.... All coding is encoding, which is fitting some domain to data structures and algorithms.
For the "delivery" part, it's especially important that your code restrict itself to what's needed by the actual end use. That might not be cool or interesting, and it often requires getting more direct appreciation of the end-use than the often-weak problem statement. It's a trap to just enjoy the beauty of it.
Someone like Noam Shazeer demonstrates the value of good coding: lots of people in his environment had lots of good ideas, but he made it happen (and it looks like he enjoyed it).