Every few weeks, someone shares a bold opinion: "Don't bother learning to code, AI will do it all." I've seen this from VCs, influencers, and people who have...

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AI hasn't eliminated the need to learn coding—it's shifted the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing it. You can't develop good technical judgment without first understanding how software works through hands-on experience. While AI can generate code faster, humans still need deep knowledge of fundamentals like algorithms, distributed systems, and data structures to evaluate what AI produces. The traditional bootcamp path may be closing, but learning to code remains essential for anyone who needs to maintain, debug, or make architectural decisions about software systems.

Yes, Learning to Code Is Still Valuable

You Can't Review What You Don't Understand

Hey…no human can beat AI in chess and we have still professional players which are earnings money, so I would say we just want that human presence in tech jobs.

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The projections say 75% of code could be AI-generated by 2026. If that happens, the ratio of AI-produced code to human reviewers could get overwhelming.
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Good point, but we must survive until then. If the generated code works and does what the product owners and stakeholders want at this point of time, they will use vibe coding. This saves money on the first iteration, and no one bothers about the next iterations, when new features must be implemented or the business process changes.
They almost never give us time for refactoring or code optimisations, because they don’t see any value in this – there is no explicit ROI, so why do this? Why does this guy think that they will be bothered about the code quality this time?

Just because 75% of code will be AI generated doesn’t mean it will be good. I agree with the author on this one, in order to conduct good code reviews you need to know what to look for and that requires knowledge of how to code as well as your codebase. A prompter can’t review their own “code” (conflict of interest) and if they don’t know what they are looking for how can they fix an issue or prevent a problem from getting added to the codebase? AI in my opinion is going to filter out the phonies, and the people who are unwilling to learn. The naturally curious, the hard workers, and the engineers who were never at risk of losing their job are going to do well in this new world. Learn how to code!

Fully agree. AI can write code fast, but without knowing the basics, it’s hard to tell if the code is correct, secure, or scalable. I’ve seen AI give answers that look right but fail in real use. Fundamentals are what help you catch those problems.

Knowing how to review the code generated by AI is essential. This is what will distinguish skilled developers from others in the future.