Learning to code is still worthwhile • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#111

Post by jtagrgh » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

exfalso wrote: post #51

adamddev1 wrote: post #33

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 adop…

There are ways to do it correctly. You just end up spending a lot of time conceptualizing and refining abstractions. To me the issue is more that conceptualizing requires a certain state of mind. Before llms it was 10% hard thinking 90% implementing. Implementation was actually sort of a reward, it felt so good just being in the zone and fleshing out ideas. Post llms I find myself walking up and down quite a lot, onl…

I'm a junior and I probably spend a similar amount of time thinking vs reviewing. I rarely write code unless it's about I find the instantaneous thinking easier now. I can have several ideas in mind, and have a concrete implementation made for each, making it easier to compare alternatives. Although, since each problem is alone easier to think about, I do end up handling a greater number of problems. But I expect that my total volume of thinking is likely the same as before.

Where I do certainly feel more tired is when I try to solve too many problems in parallel. If I try to do that, I end up constently dropping context. So I generally try to finish a big chunk of something before switching (usually that means getting it ready for another code-review cycle).

I do miss writing code myself. It's certainly satisfying. It's just significantly slower in most cases. I try to do it in my free time.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#112

Post by skydhash » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #65

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 we…

> 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.

Learning to code is not merely learning a syntax and some tooling. It’s best described in the SICP and HTDP books, as a mindset of formalizing a process enough that a dumb machine could do it. Then by building abstractions towers, we have better symbols and semantics to notate the formal aspect.

It seems that a lot of management no longer wants to provide workflows tooling to their users. Instead they want to create a wish box where those workflows would materialize somehow.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#113

Post by left-struck » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:11 AM UTC

StilesCrisis wrote: post #77

ekidd wrote: post #65

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 we…

The babysitting work would still be impossible if you didn't actually know how to code.

I think there’s potentially a future where software engineers learn how to “babysit” models instead of the details of programming. Kind of how software engineering students for the last decade at least haven’t learnt a great deal of assembly or cpu architecture. Maybe you had a unit on CPUs but it’s not central to the course.

I’m not saying I like that future, but I can imagine it.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#114

Post by whatever120 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:11 AM UTC

wasting_time wrote: post #18

The 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.

tf are you saying, magic isn’t real

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#115

Post by skydhash » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #110

adamddev1 wrote: post #33

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 adop…

Aren't the things in your second paragraph only a small fraction of coding jobs? If we end up with those being the kind of jobs you have to get to make a living as a programmer we could end up with programming a lot like sports. You can enjoy playing basketball, say, as an amateur, and you can play more seriously in high school and college, but if you want to make a living playing basketball you need to be good enoug…

Are they? Most B2C tooling are free or nearly free or serve a very small market. The heavyweights are all B2B and I don’t believe they can tolerate the inefficiency for long.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#116

Post by gpm » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

brewtide wrote: post #87

embedding-shape wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to build. It's human to want to build. Anything a human feels is human, regardless if it's to build or to not build :) Some people prefer some ways of building, others in other ways, it's all fine. I think lots of people forget that programming is a heavily creative endeavor in the end. If I wanted to be slightly controversial, I'd argue building a program is more like painting a painting than building a bri…

Interesting you bring up (artistic) painting and bridge building. I'm a house painter, and while the work is... It's just relentless work and staring all day. It's the end results of making something just, better, with the simple acts of reputation and giving a shit about it. Just wondering where house painter falls in your scale, I'd hunch.

Not the person you're replying to, but I'd agree with them, and think house painting would be basically identical to building a bridge.

The difference this comparison is capturing in my opinion is that of thinking up something new, compared to arranging things in a well known/already defined configuration. We know how to build bridges, we just have to do it (maybe including some calculations and site surveys, yes, but novel solutions are rightfully shunned). Similarly painting a house.

Developing software is practically definitionally creating a novel thing. If we wanted the same software over again we could literally copy and paste the existing executable (and we do that all the time, it's just not called developing software or enough work to be a job, since we have machines that are excellent at arranging the electrical charge in the pre-defined manner).

The actually-a-job* software equivalent of painting a house or building a bridge would be weaving a program into core rope memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

* Not a job you can get anymore.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#117

Post by drTobiasFunke » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:29 AM UTC

david-gpu wrote: post #108

drTobiasFunke wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that the amount of work is finite, so more productive people implies fewer people are required. Is that the case though? Has it ever been?

> You are assuming that the amount of work is finite, so more productive people implies fewer people are required. Is that the case though? Has it ever been? How many horse farriers have you met? How many coopers, blacksmiths, or shoemakers?

Not a fair comparison. Unlike shoemaker or coopers who do ONE thing, a SWE doesnt do just one thing.. atleast in general. I churned through basic, logo, c, c++, java, c#, python, go and now agents. The executable building on single machine died when distributed systems came in. It again evolved when cloud took over. We have been reinventing our work every few years. Every job change requires us to learn new skills.

How much did a horse farrier have to learn if they switched their employers?

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#118

Post by goda90 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

VariousPrograms wrote: post #76

It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail. 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 repl…

Here's an alternative farming analogy: knowing how to program(and adjacent skills) is like understanding plant biology, climate, food demand, supply chains etc.

Code generators are like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Powerful stuff. Lots of production. Solved some big problems. But we're seeing new problems like soil depletion, runoff, decreased nutrition and knock-on effects like obesity.

To solve those problems will take lots of people with the right skills, not people ignorantly using the fertilizers and pesticides according to the profit driven manufacturers instructions.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#119

Post by warmedcookie » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

OhSoHumble wrote: post #8

> 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…

I've done a lot of match aggregation in dota2 using stratz / opendota. It's a lot of fun and it will definitely make you a better programmer given how much data there is.

Re: Learning to code is still worthwhile

#120

Post by taybin » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 3:03 AM UTC

> 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.