Learn to Code

There has never been a better time to learn to code. This sounds backwards. AI writes code now. Why learn something a machine can do?

Because writing code was never the point. The point is understanding how to build systems that work.

Whether you type the code yourself or have an AI generate it is a minor detail. The bottleneck is knowing what to build, how the pieces fit together, and why certain architectures hold up while others collapse. That knowledge does not become less valuable when typing gets automated. It becomes more valuable.

The people who benefit most from AI are the ones who can direct it. Direction requires understanding. You cannot prompt your way to a working system if you do not know what a working system looks like.

Everyone talks about AI taking jobs. The direction of this displacement is not evenly distributed. Coders will take other people’s jobs long before anyone takes a coder’s job.

A developer with AI tools has more leverage than ever. Not because they become instant experts in design or copywriting, but because they can wire together tools and build automations that used to require coordinating with multiple specialists. The gain is in integration. One person who knows how software works can now orchestrate work that used to need a team to even scope.

The leverage is asymmetric. AI gives everyone a small boost. It gives people with software expertise a massive one.

This is because AI removes the friction that used to slow experts down. Research that took hours now takes minutes. Boilerplate you used to copy-paste or look up gets generated instantly. You can try three different approaches in the time it used to take to fully commit to one. The expertise stays the same, but the cost of applying it drops dramatically. If you know what you are doing, you can now do it much faster. If you do not, AI cannot tell you what to do next.

The gap will widen. People who can build will absorb more and more of what used to be distributed across roles. People who cannot build will find their work increasingly automatable or increasingly absorbed by those who can.

Learning to code is not about becoming a software engineer. It is about understanding the medium that now runs everything. It is about being the one who builds rather than the one who waits for something to be built.

The syntax matters less than ever. The mental models matter more than ever. How data flows. How systems fail. How abstractions leak. How to debug when something goes wrong. These are not skills that become obsolete when AI writes your functions. They are the skills that let you use AI to build anything.

You do not learn to code for the typing. You learn so that when you sit down with these tools, you know what to ask for, you can evaluate what you get back, and you can course-correct when something goes wrong. That kind of literacy has never been more valuable.