If you want to fully understand / contribute to / fully leverage the most powerful technology humanity has ever devised (AI), you must learn to read and write code. That’s the only reason anyone should need.
Learning to code is still worthwhile
11–20 of 326 posts
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#12Those are not compelling arguments.
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)
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#13I think pieces like this miss the forest for the trees. Software is the bottleneck for a vast array of economic activities. Attention from intelligent people is most of the rest. Both are mostly-commoditized already and are just waiting around for technological diffusion and the closing of the RSI loop. Unless you're doing so as a hobby with no expectation of returns, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth learning anymore.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#14I don't entirely disagree, but I absolutely hate these blog posts. They always miss the point entirely. It's been enough years of this that it seems like a deliberate muddying of waters.
"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.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#15I think pieces like this miss the forest for the trees. Software is the bottleneck for a vast array of economic activities. Attention from intelligent people is most of the rest. Both are mostly-commoditized already and are just waiting around for technological diffusion and the closing of the RSI loop. Unless you're doing so as a hobby with no expectation of returns, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth learning…
Lots of unsubstantiated claims here
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#16Learning itself still has value. Just because my arms and legs are shorter than others doesn't mean I should cut them off. Just because an LLM can do most things better than I can doesn't mean I should stop learning. Also, whether the LLM's knowledge is suited for humans is a separate issue. This isn't limited to coding—all fields of study are ultimately humanity's process of understanding the world, and it's partici…
Just because I have a car doesn't mean I should stop walking.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#17Learning 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.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#18The era of LLMs is similar to when Magic was discovered in the 1400s.
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.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#19Only because the US government is putting a bar on how intelligent of a model they are willing to allow and it seems like we are already at it. China won’t stop though so it’s going to be months to a year before we get models where learning to code makes no sense.
I feel like no matter the model, it's going to be more powerful when used by a skilled software engineer vs a layperson.
For a little while. But we’re already at the point where a layperson can feed back errors into the LLM well enough for most apps for it to fix the problems and those are the errors it misses, it gets most of them on its own.
Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile
#20I think pieces like this miss the forest for the trees. Software is the bottleneck for a vast array of economic activities. Attention from intelligent people is most of the rest. Both are mostly-commoditized already and are just waiting around for technological diffusion and the closing of the RSI loop. Unless you're doing so as a hobby with no expectation of returns, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth learning…
I don't know how one would build anything without knowing. If it was true, I would be building a competitor to Anthropic right now.