Why Now is the Best Time to Learn to Code

We are definitely living through a massive shift in software engineering productivity. Tools like Copilot and Cursor have introduced a new kind of force multiplier for developers, and I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what that means for how software gets built.

But this isn’t the end of the developer career track. It’s an evolution and expansion of what it means to build software.

What AI tools do is unlock new capabilities, not automate away the essence of software development. Productivity multipliers are not replacements; they are amplifiers. With great tools, we can build better software faster. But we still need to understand what we’re building, why, and how it behaves under real-world conditions.

Let’s play a hypothetical. Imagine a world where AI writes 100% of all code and your system crashes. Who do you blame? Who debugs the edge cases the AI didn’t foresee? Who evaluates the AI-driven post-mortem analysis for accuracy? Even with an AI with above-human code generation and investigation abilities, we will still need technical humans to guide, supervise, and interpret AI’s work, especially in complex or safety-critical systems because the alternative is blind trust of a non-deterministic system.

Also, the idea that junior developers or bootcamp grads are “too far behind” misses a crucial point. AI lowers the barrier to entry, not raises it. Today, a motivated learner with Copilot or ChatGPT can build full-stack apps in weeks that would have taken a team of developers months a few years ago. That’s powerful. What we should be doing is helping people upskill faster, not gatekeeping based on fear.

If we ever do create AIs that can autonomously design, build, and maintain software systems without human oversight, we’re not just talking about job loss. We’re talking about sentient entities with agency, legal implications, and societal impact far beyond the dev shop. That is not a software engineering discussion. That is a science fiction, civilization-level inflection point.

Until then, the value of technical skillset is going up, not down. AI is the ultimate power tool, and learning to code, even now, is like learning to drive in a world where cars just got turbocharged.

There has never been a more exciting time to be a developer. New doors are opening, not closing.