should you learn .NET & C# in 2026

A .NET developer with several years of experience argues that learning .NET and C# deeply in 2026 is no longer worth the investment. The core argument is that AI agents (particularly Claude Opus 4.7) are now capable of writing production-quality code in any language, making language-specific expertise increasingly redundant. The author identifies where humans still have an edge: handling large codebases that exceed AI context windows, and coming up with novel architectural solutions. The recommendation is to focus on software architecture, system design, and cloud architecture rather than language-specific proficiency, as the abstraction layer developers work at is shifting from code to natural language instructions.