Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?

On 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?

It is exactly analagous to ask how much math you should learn given literally everyone has a scientific calculator in their pocket at all times. The answer is: to be a mathematician or an engineer, you still need to learn how to do the math yourself. A calculator makes the math easier and faster than doing integrals longhand, but owning a calculator does not mean you know how to apply an integral to a real problem. You still must learn to write code yourself. You need to know the fundamentals of computer science, programming, algorithms. The AI is good, but it still requires human engineering effort to get good results in exactly the same way that a scientific calculator requires mathematic skill to be input in order to produce useful results. Facing a tricky software engineering problem armed with AI and no fundamental knowledge puts you in exactly the same situation as facing a tricky vector problem armed with a calculator and no fundamental knowledge. You can punch keys and get numbers out. Maybe you'll even land on the right answer, but it will take you ten times longer, produce worse results, and you won't even know if your answer is right. You won't learn anything either. Working a tricky problem is how you learn which solutions apply and how to best use your skills. AI is the same way. If you don't have the fundamental skills, you won't learn, you won't get good results, and you'll waste a ton of time producing garbage for no benefit. AI is a skill multiplier, just like a calculator. It really, truly is a garbage in, garbage out situation. If you don't put in skill and effort, you don't get good results. If you lack the fundamental skill and engineering mindset you will never get good results, you'll never learn how to get better, and you likely won't even have the capacity to judge your work as the garbage it is. The only exception is the case that AI truly reaches super-human levels of ability in the near future. That case isn't worth worrying about because the problems it will cause go far, far beyond "should I learn to code". So yes, you should learn the fundamentals. AI makes good programmers better, and conversely makes bad programmers worse.

All of it. AI is magnificent in hands of a skilled coder. And absolutely crap in hands of someone who has no clue how computers work.

Learning how to code will teach you how to break down problems and think in the way you’ll need to think to use and review code form AI. It will also teach you the language needed… not just the syntax of a programming language, but what is a function, variable, loop, conditional, etc. This will help you better talk to the AI and understand it. Trying to describe a concept you don’t really understand, when there is a simple word that can be used, will save a lot of trouble and headaches. I’d learn as much as you can without the help or use of AI, to build a solid foundation. If AI falls on its face, you’ll be ahead of all those who didn’t do that. If AI ends up being great, you’ll be able to better utilize it if you speak the same language. As far as I see it, there is only upside to learning. Even if you’re not going into the industry, learning to code helps the thinking process in a way I think almost anyone can benefit from.

Just like math is learned by solving equations, software engineering is learned by writing code Due to technological advances, solving equations stopped being a marketable skill, but understanding mathematics is as important as ever. Software engineering will follow a similar route as math- the marketable skill will no longer be to write code, but writing code will be necessary to understand the big picture and build the marketable skills.